Having completed numerous challenging bikepacking trips already, Leo Purcell decided he was ready for another adventure. This time his destination was the Alps and his route of choice was The Alps Divide, a challenging 1000km route which runs roughly north/south between Thonon-les-Bains (near Lake Geneva) and Menton (close to Monaco) or vice versa. Leo set off from the Mediterranean coast heading north, searching for some “me time” in the mountains. Will he successfully make it to his final destination? You’d better read on to find out…. 

Glancing down from the gushing pipe filling my bidon with fresh spring water, I saw a face staring back at me from the bottom of the water trough below. A stone Narcissus, submerged reminder of the perils of vanity, was, at this point, the last thing I needed. Eight nights sleeping in a bivvy bag and living off the food and clothes that I could carry on my bike had stripped me of conceit and self-consciousness. I was a dot on an immense landscape and the humility that brought felt just fine. In fact, it was one of the reasons I was there... 

I had initially set off from the Spanish-French border a couple of weeks before, riding along the French Mediterranean coast to Menton, snuggled up against the Italian border at the far end of the Riviera. Menton, with the faded grandeur of a border town that has lost its purpose in a borderless Europe, is the start (or end) point of ‘la Route des Grandes Alpes’. This epic path connecting the famous cols of the French Alps from the Med to the shores of Lake Geneva, provided the inspiration for the Alps Divide, a 1,000-kilometre mixed surface route, painstakingly pieced together by Katie-Jane L'Herpiniere and Lee Townend, mountain guides in the Western Alps. It promised to be a case study in the marvel and masochism of long-distance bikepacking.

Legs twitchy with anticipation, I set off from Menton 

Give any cyclist the chance and they’ll probably start to evangelise about why discovering places is best done by bike. The pace and range possible in a day makes hiking seem, well, pedestrian, but like walking there is a sensory connection with your environment - the sounds of birds and insects, the scent of the hedgerows, the feel of the trail, the physical connection between your effort and your progress - that is lost in motorised transport. And how better to lose oneself fully in this than to be alone? I set off from Menton unencumbered by the obligations that come with company. Me time. Bliss. Immersed in my thoughts and the landscape, my front wheel ate up the road ahead like a hungry Pacman. Riding on my own I was able to set the pace I wanted, stop when I wanted, nose around where I wanted. I was able to potter, ponder and procrastinate at will, to push-on when I felt strong and pitch camp when the day felt long. 

Time alone on the road encourages and amplifies the little interactions that light up the journey. Waiting out a rainstorm, I shared a bench under a shop awning with a small boy as he steadily worked his way through a packet of biscuits. We didn’t speak, but after about twenty minutes when I decided to get going again, he looked up and said ‘bon chance, monsieur’. For some reason, it really cheered me. Similarly, the cries of ‘Courage!’ from enthusiastic French hikers as you strain to get 20 kgs of bike up an impossibly steep trail, the whoop and flash of mutual recognition as you pass a fellow bikepacker coming in the opposite direction or the time, resting by a fountain in a Provencal village, an old lady handed me five euros from her purse and insisted I buy a Pompe a l’Huile, a traditional bread-like cake made with olive and lavender oil, from the boulangerie opposite. These moments resonate in the otherwise introspective lulls, pebbles thrown into still-watered solitude, sending gladdening ripples across the day. 

Clutching my pompe a l’huile, and being clutched by the lovely lady who bought it for me 

However, much as I had longed for the idea of a solo adventure, the reality is that they are best shared. Fortunately, I met Glenn on day two. Another foolhardy adventurer attempting to ride to Geneva along the same route, Glenn was from Belgium and became my impromptu riding buddy. The genius of this relationship was that we didn’t actually ride together very much. We’d yo-yo off each other up and down the trails, sometimes him in front, sometimes me, connected by an invisible thread of camaraderie. We’d stop in the same place each evening, sharing food, a cathartic de-brief of the day’s events and the occasional hotel room. This for me was the best of both worlds: the freedom to ride at my own pace, but with the support and company of a friend experiencing the same highs and lows, albeit not always at the same time or place. Alone, together. Paradoxically, it worked. 

Glenn, impromptu cycling buddy 

I’ve done a few big backpacking trips, but this was Glenn’s first. He had brought along a stove, coffee pot, mug, saucepan, plates, water purifier, a solar panel battery recharger... It’s fair to say Glenn’s ratio of kit carried to kit used was a bit higher than mine. We’ve all been there. On my first all-nighter I took cocoa powder and a hip flask but not a decent sleeping bag; my evening sipping hot chocolate and whiskey by the campfire like a smug cowboy descended into the coldest night of my life. Lesson learned. Glenn was also sixteen years younger than me. The extra weight he was lugging around on his bike was, I decided, like a handicap system. The legendary Italian cyclist Fausto Coppi’s cynical observation that “age and treachery will overcome youth and skill” came to mind. 

Our first day riding together started surreally. Our route crossed that of the Etape du Tour, the amateur version of the Tour de France. Slipping through the cordon of gendarmes we were suddenly riding along closed roads lined with crowds. I rolled into town behind the lead rider making a solo breakaway from the peloton. To the roadside fans, it appeared as though I was in second place, trundling along, laden with bags, baguette strapped to the bike, a pair of socks airing in the breeze. I lapped up the cheers, punching the air with a huge grin. It was a short-lived moment of light relief. Shortly afterwards, my bike computer gave a chirpy notification to announce the start of the next climb: the Col de la Bonette, the highest paved road in Europe, 2,400 vertical metres to ascend from the valley floor, in one, unbroken climb. A mile and half, up. Not a mile and a half, uphill; a mile and half, vertically. These are crazy numbers, off the scale of anything I had come across before. It was the Col du Tourmalet, the highest pass in the Pyrenees that I had ridden the previous summer and then another thousand metres more. 

"I felt tiny, out of place and intimidated by the scale and brutality of the scenery."

Imperceptibly, I rose from the busy valley floor. Roads got quieter, narrower, steeper, hugging contours as they eked out the path of least resistance across the flanks of huge slabs of mountain. Villages were left behind in favour of remote chalets and cabins, then just the occasional makeshift barn and shepherds' huts. Alpine meadows gave way to pine forest, the trees thinned to high pasture and then even the grass gave up, replaced by barren scree and rock. The sky was dark, with moody clouds gathering at the peaks. I felt tiny, out of place and intimidated by the scale and brutality of the scenery. Still the pedals turned, not with a light-footed spin, but with the slow cadence of legs tired of having to coax, convince and coerce the heavy bike upwards. I stopped to gorge on a slab of marzipan I had bought the day before. Food reduced to its basest form, it was simply fuel - 1⁄3 almonds, 2⁄3 sugar - and it tasted fantastic. Onwards. I stopped at a World War Two bunker guarding a high pass and freaked myself out exploring the underground maze of rooms and corridors by torchlight. Upwards. Road gave way to rough gravel, scored with gullies of meltwater. I crossed patches of slushy snow, dirty white against the dark rock all around. The track joined a road and the road led, finally, to the summit, the Col de la Bonette. At 2,800 metres elevation, it was the highest paved road in Europe. There was Glenn who had passed me whilst I’d been in the bunker. A motorbike rider, taking a photo of me at the top asked in French if I wanted one with my son. He was referring to Glenn. I found it hilarious and he snapped me as I laughed. 

At the summit of the Col de la Bonnette 

"Like one of those fateful stories of doomed Everest attempts, the weather closed in as we posed for pictures at the top."

We still had to get down of course. Like one of those fateful stories of doomed Everest attempts, the weather closed in as we posed for pictures at the top. The initial part of the route down was via a steep, loose gravel track. No fast, flowy reward for all that upwards effort, this was tricky, technical stuff requiring concentration, agility and balance. The rain was heavy now and the temperature dropped to four degrees. Tired, cold and soaked to the skin, it was a while before we rolled into Barcelonnette, a tres typique French market town, where we found a hotel room and shared a hot meal together. 

Much as I valued the road-trip bromance with Glenn, it was just a side order to the main course which was the landscape we traversed. I have bikepacked the karst spine of the Balkans from Slovenia to Montenegro, the 5000-year-old Ridgeway path that bisects southern England and crossed the Pyrenees from Atlantic to Mediterranean, but nothing compares to the grandeur and beauty of the Alps in summer. Meadows flush with wildflowers, streams gushing from verdant hillsides, high pastures folded by light and shadow, bleak peaks harsh with scree and the threat of storms, dramatic panoramas of crests, valleys and ridges echoing with the shrieks of marmots. Each summit gained was like turning the page in a magical pop-up book, a new vista springing up before our eyes. 

Racing the sun down into an Italian valley 

The toil though, the toil. Those magnificent picture-postcard moments don’t come for free. The route profile is like a shark’s jaw, jagged with peaks, climbs like the Col de la Bonette that would last three, four, five hours. Measuring a day's effort required recalibration. Distance covered and even metres ascended became less relevant than time spent; I’ve never worked so hard on a bike for such a slow average speed, especially when the trails were rough or involved hike-a-bike sections. Here was the great trade-off of the route though: the looser the surface and the steeper the climb, the more dramatic the summit and more hidden the valley beyond. This was the essence of the experience for me: flow state moments of exertion, awestruck arrival at a deserted col and a sweeping descent to reward the endeavour. At the bottom of each valley were pretty villages, campsites and boulangeries bursting with fresh bread, homemade quiches and buttery croissants. ‘Resupply’ is a key part of self-supported bikepacking, and here it was a joy, picking juicy apricots from market stalls, refilling bidons from mountain streams and fountains like the one where I encountered the Narcissus (part of an art installation in the Vanoise National Park) or, one night, gorging on wood fired pizza in an orchard. Even so, it was still a challenge to get enough calories in the belly and packed on the bike to power long days in the saddle. 

"I was there for the mountains, the moments of discovery and connection, the slow-burn buzz of inching across an epic landscape."

At a certain point though, how can it not become a little Sisyphean? Hours spent sweating up, each vertical metre expensively earned, to then blow it all in a spending spree of madcap descent, arriving broke (and, increasingly, broken) at the valley floor, only to begin again. The challenge - to ride from the shores of the Mediterranean to the shores of Lake Geneva - had always felt a little arbitrary to me. It was a construct; I liked the notion, but it didn’t define the experience. I was there for the mountains, the moments of discovery and connection, the slow-burn buzz of inching across an epic landscape. I suspected all along that there might come a tipping point where freshness lost the battle with fatigue. This cumulative attrition is not just physical; the will to suffer is finite too. And so it was. The moving time each day got shorter, the rests longer, the little stops more frequent, the mood more irritable. The need for respite overwhelmed the will to push-on. Fourteen nights on the road since crossing from Spain into France, eleven of them sleeping in a bivvy bag, had taken their toll.

Long shadows on what would turn out to be my last morning on the Alps Divide route 

On what would turn out to be my final night on the trail, Glenn and I stayed in a mountain refuge - Refuge de la Coire, 50€ for dinner, bed and breakfast - watching the shadows lengthen as the last light lit the peaks around us. . We shared a meal with hikers, each of whom had an adventure in their back catalogue to gazump our exploits: the Belgian opposite had once ridden from Malaga to Brussels, the gruff Frenchman to his right had hiked the ‘grande traversee des Alpes’ from the Med to Geneva and was now on his way back. We talked about the huge sheep dogs we had passed, there to guard their flocks against growing populations of wolves and learned that a wolf will eat a sheep’s organs but tend to leave the meat on the carcass. We were in another realm up there. 

Posing in front of Mont Blanc 

Waking early, we push-carried our bikes up to a high balcony track with stunning views of the Mont Blanc massif. The night in the refuge followed by the reveal of that panorama felt like defining moments of the trip, but the urge to stop had become irresistible. It was the right moment to wind things up, to quit the route before I started to resent it. As I waited for Glenn at the aptly named Col du Joly, just short of Chamonix, I felt no regrets. We said our goodbyes over an ice-cream before I plummeted off the trail, hugging hairpins down into the nearest west-facing valley as I pointed the bike towards home.