Aurélie Bonnet is forty-eight, works in the cadastre office in Annecy, and has ridden the Colombière two hundred and six times. She keeps the count in a notebook, not on a computer, and the notebook is nearly full.
We met at the roundabout in Thônes at twenty past five. There were four of us, which is what is left of the Tuesday group in May before the tourists arrive and after the winter people have given up. Aurélie had a gilet, a spare tube and no lights, on the grounds that it would be daylight by Saint-Jean-de-Sixt and she was not planning to be slow.
Why half past five
Because by seven the Colombière has cars on it. Not many — it is not the Alpe — but enough that you spend the top four kilometres listening instead of riding. At half past five you have the road, the cowbells and, from about the fifth hairpin, an hour of light coming up the valley behind you at roughly the speed you are going.
Aurélie rides a Col 52 in chalk, bought in 2022, on the 38 mm wheels because she does not believe in deep rims on a mountain and nobody here is going to argue with two hundred ascents. She has changed the stem once, in the second week, from 100 to 90, which is what Luc said would happen and which she reminds him of every spring.
“The bicycle is not the reason I go up it. But it is the reason I am still going up it at forty-eight.”
The hairpins
There are not two hundred of them. There are eleven that count, between Le Reposoir and the col, stacked up the face like a badly folded map, and the number in the title is hers: two hundred hairpins is what she calls a season. It is 11.7 kilometres from Le Reposoir at an average of 8.5 per cent, and the two steepest hundred metres are not at the top, which is the part people get wrong.
She climbs seated, at a cadence of about seventy-eight, and she talks for the first six kilometres and then stops talking. On this particular Tuesday she stopped talking at the fourth hairpin and did not start again until the sign. Nobody asked her to slow down.
At the top there was frost on the barrier, a van selling nothing yet, and the Aravis in the distance with cloud sitting in the gap where the road goes. We drank a coffee out of a thermos, we descended to La Clusaz in the cold, and Aurélie was at her desk by twenty past nine.
What we take from it
Two things go into the frames from mornings like this one. The first is the seat angle: everybody in this valley climbs seated, for a long time, and a bicycle that puts you a degree too far back is a bicycle you fight at eight per cent. The second is the chainstay. Four hundred and eight millimetres is not an aerodynamic number or a light one. It is the number at which a bicycle stays under you on the descent to La Clusaz when your hands are cold.
Number two hundred and seven is in the notebook now. It says, in full: 13 mai, avec les garçons, froid, bien.
Luc Pélissier · Le Reposoir · 12 May 2025