The Grimsel road exists because of the dams. It climbs past a chain of reservoirs held in bare granite — Räterichsboden, then the Grimselsee under the summit — and the engineering is the landscape here rather than an intrusion into it. From Innertkirchen the road follows the Hasli valley floor before it starts stepping up the rock.
Twenty-six kilometres and 1,533 metres, and the average is the least useful number on the page. The climb is a staircase: ramps at seven to nearly nine per cent, separated by near-flat kilometres running along the water.
On a staircase the work happens in the transitions. Each flat section lets the speed build, and each ramp takes it away again, so the ride becomes a sequence of accelerations rather than one long effort. That rewards a stiff bottom bracket and punishes a heavy one — the opposite of what a steady climb like the Giau asks for, on a road that is almost twice as long.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
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