CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
Blue water, Alpine edges and clean Bavarian rhythm. Out of Kochel and back again: 81 km, roughly 1 h 36 in the saddle. The stops in between: Walchensee road, Jachenau valley and Bad Tölz. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,250 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available.
This part of the ride is 12 km of German Alpine Road.
Kochel am See lies right at the point where the Bavarian flatlands end, as if somebody had stood the Alps up against the lake. The Kochelsee is a small, deep glacial lake of a few kilometres' length with reed beds along the north shore, and behind the village the ground rises sharply to the Herzogstand and Heimgarten, two wooded ridges that give the lake its backdrop. The village has about four thousand people, a handful of cafes, a promenade and, if you ride south from Penzberg, the first real sense of arriving in the mountains.
Read the complete Kochelsee lakeside write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kochelsee lakeside sits at 0 km, early in the day. Next is Walchensee road.
The Walchensee is one of the deepest and clearest Alpine lakes in Germany, and the road along its eastern and southern shore is one of the most photographed in Bavaria. The water is a turquoise that looks almost Caribbean when the sun hits the shallows, and it is fed by cold springs, which keep it chilly all summer. Around it rise forested slopes, the Herzogstand to the north and the peaks of the Karwendel and the Estergebirge to the south, so the lake sits in a bowl, with its surface often creased by wind.
Read the complete Walchensee road write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Walchensee road comes up about 12 km into the recorded legs. Next is Jachenau valley.
Not many people know the Jachenau. It is a long, narrow side valley that runs east from the Walchensee region to the Isar, shut in by forested ridges and farmed by a few families on meadow terraces, and it has the quality of a place that the main roads missed. Lenggries, with its nine thousand inhabitants, is the nearest real town and the place for petrol, bakeries and shops, about eleven kilometres to the east.
Read the complete Jachenau valley write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 32 km into the recorded legs you reach Jachenau valley. Next is Bad Tölz food.
Bad Tölz is the market town of the Isarwinkel, a place of seventeen thousand people on the Isar river with the Alps standing behind it, and it is the sort of town where a motorcyclist can eat very well. The old main street, the Marktstraße, climbs gently from the river and is lined with houses painted in bright colours and decorated with gables and painted fronts, a pattern that Bavarian towns have followed for centuries. It is a spa town in a modest way, known since the nineteenth century for the iodine-rich springs that gave it the name Bad, and people still come here for the cure.
Read the complete Bad Tölz food write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Somewhere to get off the bike, about 57 km into the recorded legs. Next is Back to Kochelsee.
Kochel am See lies at the foot of the Alps, where the Bavarian lowlands finally give way to mountains, and the Kochelsee fills the basin in front of it with a sheet of green-blue water about six hundred metres above the sea. The town has about four thousand people and a long lakeside promenade, with the first big peaks rising behind. The painter Franz Marc, one of the founders of the Blue Rider group, lived in the village of Ried, just outside, and the Franz Marc Museum on the hill above the lake holds a lovely collection of his work and that of his circle. Marc died at Verdun in 1916.
Read the complete Kochelsee write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Back to Kochelsee. That is the ride.
This Jachenau valley → Bad Tölz food stretch is for rhythm and scenery. Keep your head up, let the view breathe, and resist turning every open bend into a target. Stop once properly rather than half-stopping everywhere.
Bad Tölz food → Back to Kochelsee is the logistics leg. Watch junctions, villages and speed changes, then let the roadbook do its job: move you out of the clutter without spending your best attention too early.