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.
A 295 km round trip from Champagnole - roughly 5 h 44 in the saddle. The stops in between: From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai, Fortifications of Vauban, Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans and La citadelle. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did. Water arrives beside the road and stays for 41 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Lac de Chalain is the largest natural lake in the French Jura, a long, green-blue lake set in a valley among forested limestone cliffs, and its shores were home to farming villages built on piles thousands of years ago. The remains of these villages, preserved in the lake bed, are part of the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, listed by UNESCO in 2011. In the 1900s, when the lake level was lowered for a hydroelectric project, a dugout canoe and the remains of houses were found, and excavations since then have revealed a remarkable picture of life in the Neolithic.
Read the complete Lac de Chalain write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lac de Chalain is where the day begins. Next is From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai.
Salins-les-Bains lies at the bottom of a deep, narrow valley in the Jura, squeezed between two forested ridges, each crowned by a fort, and its wealth for most of history came from beneath its streets. Deep underground, salty water flows through layers of rock salt, and for over a thousand years the people of Salins pumped it up and boiled it in great pans to make salt, a precious commodity before refrigeration, used to preserve food and taxed heavily by the crown. The Grande Saline, the great saltworks, is now a museum, and you can walk through its underground galleries, where a huge hydraulic wheel and pump from the nineteenth century still turn, lifting brine from the depths.
Read the complete From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai comes up about 35 km into the recorded legs. Next is Fortifications of Vauban.
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802, and so were the Lumière brothers, the pioneers of cinema, a generation later. The capital of Franche-Comté sits in a tight loop of the river Doubs, with the old town on the peninsula inside the loop and the citadel on a rock at the neck, closing the only side not protected by water. The citadel was built by Vauban, Louis XIV's great military engineer, after the French conquest of the region in the late seventeenth century, and it is one of the twelve groups of Fortifications of Vauban listed by UNESCO in 2008.
Read the complete Fortifications of Vauban write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 77 km into the recorded legs you reach Fortifications of Vauban. Next is Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans.
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux wanted to build an ideal city, and he started with a salt factory. The Saline Royale at Arc-et-Senans was built between 1775 and 1779 on the orders of Louis XV's administration, to boil brine into salt, and Ledoux designed it as a perfect half circle of buildings around the director's house, with the workers, the boiling halls and the management all arranged in a geometric order meant to express reason, hierarchy and efficiency. It never grew into the full circular city he imagined, but what was built is astonishing, and it was listed by UNESCO in 1982, later joined by the great saltworks at Salins-les-Bains.
Read the complete Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans, about halfway. Next is La citadelle.
Besancon sits in a tight loop of the Doubs river, almost an island, and above the loop a great rock rises more than a hundred metres. On top of it stands the Citadel, the fortress that the military engineer Vauban built for Louis XIV after the king captured the region from Spain in 1674. It is one of the twelve fortified sites that UNESCO listed together in 2008 as the Fortifications of Vauban, and it is a fine example of his work, with thick walls, bastions and long ramparts that follow the line of the rock.
Read the complete La citadelle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
La citadelle sits at 168 km, about halfway. Next is back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans comes up about 184 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Fortifications of Vauban.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Fortifications of Vauban write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 219 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Fortifications of Vauban. Next is back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai, late in the day. Next is Lac de Chalain.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Lac de Chalain write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 295 km.
Lac de Chalain → From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai → Fortifications of Vauban is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fortifications of Vauban → Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans is 36 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans → La citadelle is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
La citadelle → back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans is 36 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans → back through Fortifications of Vauban is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Fortifications of Vauban → back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai → Lac de Chalain is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.