CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. 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.
curated scenic road. cliff tunnel, Taihang Mountains, canyon. A one-way ride of 56 km, Chengguan to the finish - roughly 57 min in the saddle. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,200 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For 1 km this is Guoliang Tunnel Road, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Chengguan is the old core of Huixian, a county-level city in the north of Henan that sits right where the North China Plain stops being flat. To the south and east the land runs out level, a grid of wheat and maize fields and straight poplar-lined roads; to the north-west, close enough to fill the skyline on a clear day, the Taihang Mountains rise in tiers of red and buff rock. For anyone riding to Guoliang, this is the last proper town before the climb, and it behaves like one: traffic, scooters, food stalls, shops, mechanics and filling stations, with the provincial city of Xinxiang about thirty kilometres away for anything bigger.
Read the complete Chengguan write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Guoliang Tunnel Road point 1 sits at 0 km, early in the day. Next is Guoliang Tunnel Road point 2.
Up on the high shelf of the Taihang, above the cliffs that make the area famous, sits Guoliang, a village of stone houses built from the same reddish sandstone that forms the walls around it. For centuries the only practical link to the valley below was a stairway cut into the cliff, and the village lived the way remote mountain places do: terraced plots, a few animals, water carried by hand. Today it is part of the Wanxianshan scenic area, and on a summer weekend there are more visitors than residents, but walk a few lanes back from the main square and you still find low doorways, stone roofs and persimmon trees.
Read the complete Guoliang Tunnel Road point 2 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Guoliang Tunnel Road point 2 comes up 18 km in. Next is Guoliang Tunnel Road point 3.
The Guoliang tunnel is one of those roads that is famous because of how it was made rather than how fast you can ride it. In the 1970s, with no road to the outside world and no help coming, villagers from Guoliang decided to cut one themselves, through the cliff face rather than around it. They sold animals to buy hammers, chisels and explosives and worked for about five years, mostly by hand, until a gallery roughly 1.2 kilometres long ran along the inside of the rock wall, wide enough for a small vehicle and lit by a row of rough openings that look straight out over the gorge.
Read the complete Guoliang Tunnel Road point 3 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
56 km in you reach Guoliang Tunnel Road point 3.