This makes road cycling really fun: on a path no wider than a towel, knee-high grass caresses your legs. Roots grow across it, a stream babbles over it. The path leads uphill through cool morning mountain forest and hazy golden light, then across an open meadow where the sun is already burning down from the sky. I tackle the last steep metres at a walking pace. The gorse blooms at the edge of the path, herbs are fragrant and grasshoppers chirp. Cowbells ring out in the distance, reminding me that I'm not roaming through Mediterranean hills, but deep in the Black Forest. More precisely: on a mountain meadow, a good 900 metres above the Simonswald valley and just a few metres below the summit of the Kandel. Its legendary twelve-kilometre-long north-west ascent with its almost one thousand metres of altitude difference has earned the 1,241-metre-high mountain a reputation among racing cyclists as one of the toughest in the Black Forest. The eastern ramp from Simonswald, where I started in the morning, is no less tough. Only instead of fine tarmac, a gravelled dirt road winds its way up the steep slope, hairpin bend by hairpin bend, before turning into a single trail towards the end. Nobody in their right mind would ride up there on a racing bike and have fun doing it. Or do they?
I've been travelling in the Black Forest for four days, starting in Pforzheim in the north and heading for Bad Säckingen on the border with Switzerland - and most of the time off the tarmac roads. It's bumpy. It's dirty. Arms and legs are scratched. And it gets more fun every day. I'm not riding a filigree road racer, but a cross-country bike: light, robust aluminium frame, powerful V-brakes. And studded tyres with as little air in them as possible so that they are supple and grip better off-road. For racing cyclists, cyclocross is more of a winter sport: varied, muddy, fast - and above all short. But in summer and on a long distance? Why not?
You can download the entire article and GPS data for these tours below:
- Day 1: Through the dark north
67 km, 1,660 metres in altitude, max. 20 percent gradient
- Day 2: View of views
74 km, 1,830 metres in altitude, max. 15 percent gradient T
- Day 3: To the waterfall and root carpet
63 km, 1,760 metres in altitude, max. 22 percent gradient
- Day 4: To the world's largest cuckoo
47 km, 1,330 metres in altitude, max. 20 percent gradient
-Day 5: Up the Kandel
57 km, 1,830 metres in altitude, max. 17 percent gradient
- Day 6: Test of strength for climbers
88 km, 2,630 vertical metres, max. 22 percent gradient
- Day 7: Almost roll out
51 km, 1,070 metres in altitude, max. 18 percent gradient
