Gerlos is a ski village strung along a high Tyrolean saddle, roughly 1,200 metres up, between the Zillertal to the west and the Salzach valley to the east. It is the sort of place that is busiest in February, and in summer feels pleasantly half asleep, with farmhouses and chalets, cows with bells, and a handful of cafés that serve strudel to people in leathers at an unhurried pace. The nearest town of any size is a long way off, so think of it as a stop for coffee and a stretch rather than a place to do errands.
The pass itself, the Gerlos Pass, tops out a little above the village at a bit over 1,500 metres, and it has been a crossing for centuries, used by farmers, drovers and smugglers long before anyone paved it. The modern road was built as an alpine toll route in the 1960s, which explains why the gradients are gentle and the corners wide. It is a road made for steady riding, not for heroics. You can lean the bike into the long bends and watch the view change from forest to open pasture to the green water of the Durlassboden reservoir lower down the Zillertal side.
That reservoir deserves a pause if the light is good. It was built for hydropower, as so many valleys here were, and the dam wall is a surprisingly dramatic piece of engineering in an otherwise soft landscape. Gmünd and the Gerlos stream pour down toward Zell am Ziller, the town of the Gauderfest and the Zillertal brewery, where you can find real fuel stations and food. For the practical rider, the lesson is simple: fuel in Zell or back at Neukirchen, not in the village.
The descent into the Zillertal is one of the nicer stretches of tarmac in Tyrol, with a few hairpins and then long open curves through forest. Be wary of wet leaves in autumn and of tour coaches in July, and watch for cyclists, who treat this pass as a training run. If you are heading on toward Innsbruck or the Brenner, you will drop into the valley in good time for lunch; if you are turning around, you have the pleasure of riding the same road in the opposite direction, which always feels like a different road.