Tour de France 2012, stage 11: guide to today's mountains Saint-François-Longchamp (1,490m, 11.5km) announces the first intrusion of winter sports and the barren, grass-covered yoke on which sits the col appears. The ski clutter begins to proliferate, past Les Longes (13.1km) and chalets scattered across the mountainside hove into view. This is Longchamp ski station at 1,650m, a formless sprawl. The road creeps through and onto bare hillside, sparse of tree and bush. The greater presence is of posts leaning drunkenly, supporting the button lifts, the concrete stanchions of electricity cables, telegraph poles and overhead cables and wires, like strands of rope hanging out to dry. The higher up the freer of these intrusions, but here looms a télésiège (chairlift) into view. There is no getting away from wintry mechanistics up here. The last kilometres spool round the grassy slope and the col arrives without ceremony on a wind-scarped straight of no grandeur. A restaurant, La Banquise, on one side of the road, and a bar with stepped gables, Les Mazols, opposite and set back. The col sign gives 2,000m and everyone else insists on 1,993m. Le Cheval Noir is the bristling crag up to the right. From the col, the throat of the northern valley seems to be sucking at the road as it were a strand of spaghetti. This northern side of the mountain named for Mary Magdalene is far more attractive, more generously au naturel, more rugged and unsullied, its original frank rustic terrain left unspoiled, principally thanks to a less intrusive presence of ski works than on its southern flank, whose huddling lower slope might well evoke the anguish and tears of the woman who lingered at the foot of the Cross when all the disciples, save John, had fled. Described in early teachings as the apostles" apostle, Mary of Magdala (probably a town by Galilee) was the first person to encounter the risen Christ (Mark xvi: 9) and her identification with a repentant prostitute is almost certainly an error of translation. That she did give her name to "maudlin" - a word which declined from the simple sense of lachrymose to the more pejorative tearful sentimentality - is unfortunate. It calls, unfairly, into question her sincerity and calumniates her name and character. The road runs open on long straights with coquettish flicks of bend and without a barrier. At 4.8km a torrent gushes off the cliffs, and not until around 7 kilometres from the col do trees begin to multiply as the valley of the Eau Rousse gradually closes in to a V shape. Le Logis des Fées (1,845m, 8.4km - literally "fairy dwellings") and Celliers-Dessus are no more, each one, than a handful of houses, and whence hail those fairies I do not know. Celliers-Chapelle is much larger and in maroon letters on the pale yellow (old gold) of the back wall of its church is written: "ND de Celiers Priez Pour Nous," the missing "l" in Celliers here coming out of what may be my defective memory and possibly, therefore, a calumnious slur on local literacy. The walls of the valley tighten and a concrete parapet acts as barrier for a resurfaced road forced to squeeze tight through Celliers-la-Thuile. Outside the hamlet that morning misty, moisty and dowly was the weather, and we met a woman gathering snails from a bank of nettles, her in a clear plastic rain hat and the snails she gathered in a clear polythene bag. Along the skyline ahead, the mountain heights brood, like a stone-faced reception committee of Mafiosi bosses, a silent impassive board of examiners at a viva voce ready to pose the heavy stunner of a question on the hapless candidate. Trees crowd back at 14km, the road surface is uneven, on past a torrent (16.2km) and onto new tarmac. In Bonneval, a barn houses veal calves, suckled on milk to make their meat tender. This northern approach, some 27 kilometres from La Rochette (374m) on the left bank of the Isère, is a more friendly, engaging ride, albeit there are, as with the southern side, long stretches of road with a blank side wall of hedge lower down. The gradients are similar, but there is a better supply of sinuous bends and flow. Col de la Croix de Fer: 2,067m Northern approach from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne 560m The direct route up the D926 is 29.9 kilometres long and the maximum gradient, on a road of variable rhythm, nudges 10 per cent. We give an alternative longer approach on a quieter road to the west. Le Gavroche, a restaurant in the Place du Marché, Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, prides itself on its home cooking. They "peel, slice, scrape, stir, taste and season fresh produce." There is a Musée de l'Opinel in town devoted to the knife invented by Joseph Opinel, who made the prototypes for friends and then, in the 1890s, began to sell them more widely. The Opinel was the original penny knife: traditionally a beechwood handle (now they sometimes use oak, walnut, olive or hornbeam) with a high carbon blade, now stainless steel (marked INOX - inoxidable). The blade of the Opinel, favourite pocket knife with gardeners and picknickers alike, comes in various shapes - sharp or blunt-tipped, billhook (its curve modelled on the famous Turkish yatagan sword) - and bears the stamp of a right hand, thumb outstretched, index and middle finger pointing to a crown. The image of the hand comes from the arms of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, and represents the relics of John the Baptist, three of whose finger-bones were supposedly brought back from Alexandria by Saint Thecla in the 5th century and are now kept in the vestry of the 11th-15th century Cathedral dedicated to him. The crown is that of the arms of Savoy. Thecla, a young noblewoman who became a follower of Saint Paul, first heard the man banging on about the virtues of virginity - care for the things of the Lord as against those of the world - and thought "That's for me." She survived various attempts to martyr her - by bonfire ...devouring by wild animal ...violation - thanks to her armour of chastity. No record of her existence is extant. Is this the place to point out (I believe it is) that the bonfire originally marked the midsummer festival, 24 June (the solstice is 21 June) usurped by the church in the name of Saint John the Baptist, whose feast day it is? A glorious blaze for the full radiance of the sun, as recorded in Festyvall by Wynken de Worde in 1493: "In worshyppe of saynte Johan the people waked at home & made iij maner of fyres. One was clene bones and noo [i.e no] woode, and that is called a bone fyre. Wynken de Worde, originally Wynken of Woerth in Alsace (died 1534), a publisher, popularised the use of Caxton's printing press in England. François-Emanuelle Fodéré, a native son of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne (born 1764), founded a system of médecine légale incorporating droits du malade, namely legal rights for the sick, at a time when many physicians were cavalier with both diagnosis and prescription. Folklore had it that Maurienne was linked to the Moors (French Maures) and that its inhabitants, therefore, had Moorish blood in their veins, not quite the thing, not pukkah. Those siding with this prejudice, the Tarentaises of the Isère valley, were wont to say: "Better ten moles in your garden than a Mauriennais for a neighbour." They may still say it. The D78D to Jarrier leaves the main road out of town at 650m. The view of Saint-Jean is not attractive to look down on: new square-block geometry buildings, ill-designed and blank of aspect, offset a tasteless industrial farrago beyond the town limits. Don't look back. Enjoy the wriggly, quieter road, through a succession of villages and hamlets at a pull of some 8% on your effort. A wooden cross marked "Mission 1948" at around 5km, 970m, a 16th century church in Jarrier and a left turn towards Toussuire. After Les Bottières (1,272m, 8.7km - a patois word for "wooded places"), and the Porte des Sybelles, the slope eases for nearly four kilometres, gathering energy for the final eight kilometres of between 7-9 per cent. The Camping du Col (1,637m, 16.4km) sits by a junction for a three-kilometre loop via Toussuire the ski station (1,705m) - one balcony nearby ornamented with cut-out bikes, yellow, white, green dots. The apartment towers of Le Corbier in view off to the left. Toussuire was once toche, a parcel of forest sold at auction, the buyer being then held responsible to work it, or else an area of common land bestowed free or else for rent, for cultivation; otherwise, from touches, those poles protruding from snowdrifts to mark the paths. The road swings down through Fontcouverte at 1,170m (a polka-dot horse on a barn) a further 4.6 kilometres to rejoin the main D926 to the Croix de Fer. The village of La Bise (905m), a short way from the turn, gets its (Provençal) name from the chill north wind, not a stolen kiss (bise, bisou) at moth time. Enjoy a downhill rest for three kilometres into Le Crêt and prepare for a quadruple smack of up to 9 p[er cent before a succession of tunnels, the Combe Soudan (178m - lit), the Grand Tunnel (503m - lit), the Viaduc des Sallanches ...and note the course of the old road through a gallery of what was a very tight piercing of the rock. Another nine kilometres of mild climbing through various roadside attractions, more or less attractive, but ample of benefit to thirst or hunger, into Malcrozet, part of a sort of ski-set strip, three villages coalesced, where the gradient wakes up and cuts in with 7.5-10 per cent for seven long kilometres into the uninhabited upper storey of this climb. By the turn off to Saint-Jean-d'Arves, in a side road, a polka-dot cow affixed to a telegraph pole and a piebald horse a bit further on, relics of the last time the tour passed this way, 2008. Saint-Sorlin-d'Arves (1,515m) 7.3km from the col, consists of a crowding of bars, hotels, restaurants, cafés, chalets, apartment blocks, residences, ski souvenir shops, a very commercial straining for attention. The road narrows to squeeze the last bit of juice out of the place, barely two cars" width. About four kilometres on, a graffito "APERO GRATOS" (i.e. gratis ...free drink) with three arrows pointing to the left clings on, presumably from when the race went through, and "LE TOURS [sic] TOUJOURS." The skyline shows a jagged row of what might be broken and carious teeth, an old shark's worn crunchers. Another two kilometres and into a zone of rock, flattish but lumpy, like badly-laid oversite concrete, where, on a right-hand hairpin, perches a house (a refuge?) shuttered and closed ..."CANCELLARA" (i.e. Fabian, the Swiss rider) gets a mention on the road, there's a small pond down to the right (anglers in attendance, maybe) with reed-fringed banks. A Chalet du col de la Croix de Fer stands near the iron cross, privy to a yawning view of the basin south, whose sides fall away steeply towards the Glandon. From the Col du Glandon 1,924m Length: 2.6km Height gained: 143m A swift climb up a rocky traverse. The filigree iron cross is there near the col, marking a pilgrims" route or simply to nod reverently at God's ubiquitous presence. Col du Mollard 1,638m The Latin moles, "a mass or heap of matter," gives môle, "a mountain round in shape," think molehill on a grand scale. The detour round the Mollard col offers another alternative to the main road up to the Croix de Fer. The D110 from the outskirts of Saint-Jean marches in parallel with the D926 to Gévoudaz (790m) from which there is a twisty road, 11.2 kilometres, to Albiez-Montrond at 9.7km, 1520m (another molehill simulacrum), and round to the col. From Albiez, there are promenades au cheval (horse rides) and some way on, in the old town Albiez-le-Vieux, a board relating this story: Long ago, an old man of Mollard had a mule that was lame, worn down by the toil of hauling hay, wood and provisions. He went down the mountain to the fair at Saint-Jean to buy a strong animal to replace it. On the way back, just above Gévoudaz, the new mule suddenly halted and began to tremble violently. The man said: "Ho, a fine mule like you, sick already? Come on, eat this bunch of sorrel and if you go well up to the Oratoire du Désert I'll make an offering of five sous (pennies). The mule picked up and on they went. When they reached the Oratory, the mule seemed not in the least tired. The man reflected. Clearly the mule wasn't sick after all. He decided to press on without stopping or honouring his promise of a votive offering. The road to Saint-Jean-au-Mollard is long. Reaching the col, the man paused, sat on a rock and said to the mule: "You are a brave beast. I did well to buy you. You are courageous and, what's more, you've saved me five sous. And the mule dropped dead on the spot. As neat an example of condign punishment as you will find, I dare say. At a bumpy rate of between 4.5 and 9 per cent, the road drops just less than 5 kilometres back to the main road just above Pont de Belleville (1,245m). A graffito on a wall as you head for the Croix (14 km distant), in red, "BRAVO A TOUS," from the Marmotte, for sure.