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.
336 km from Clairvaux-les-Lacs to Clairvaux-les-Lacs, about 6 h 04 of riding. The stops in between: From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai, Lac de Chalain, Saline de Salins-les-Bains and Fortifications of Vauban. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
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 56 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
The Jura plateau behind Clairvaux-les-Lacs is a country of limestone, cows and lakes, and the Grand Lac de Clairvaux is the largest of the lakes that give the town its name. Prehistoric people lived on its shore on pilings, in villages that rose and fell for centuries, and the waterlogged mud preserved their wood and tools. The sites on Clairvaux's lakes are among the pile-dwelling places inscribed on the UNESCO list in 2011. The lake today is a quiet blue sheet, ringed by reeds and low wooded hills, with a beach where families swim in July.
Read the complete Le Grand Lac de Clairvaux write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Le Grand Lac de Clairvaux 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 52 km into the recorded legs. Next is Lac de Chalain.
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.
about 87 km into the recorded legs you reach Lac de Chalain. Next is Saline de Salins-les-Bains.
Salt built Salins-les-Bains, and the name gives it away. A salt spring, rich in brine, rises in this narrow valley in the Jura, and people have been boiling it for salt since Roman times or earlier. In the Middle Ages the saltworks were among the largest in the region, and the spring made the town and its lords rich. The Grande Saline, the great saltworks, is now a museum, and together with the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, the neoclassical complex designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, it has been listed by UNESCO.
Read the complete Saline de Salins-les-Bains write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Saline de Salins-les-Bains, about halfway. 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.
Fortifications of Vauban sits at 186 km, about halfway. Next is back through Saline de Salins-les-Bains.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Saline de Salins-les-Bains write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Saline de Salins-les-Bains comes up about 210 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through 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.
about 245 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Lac de Chalain. 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 Le Grand Lac de Clairvaux.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Le Grand Lac de Clairvaux write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 336 km.
Le Grand Lac de Clairvaux → From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai is 52 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
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.
Lac de Chalain → Saline de Salins-les-Bains is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Saline de Salins-les-Bains → Fortifications of Vauban is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fortifications of Vauban → back through Saline de Salins-les-Bains is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Saline de Salins-les-Bains → back through Lac de Chalain is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Lac de Chalain → back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai → Le Grand Lac de Clairvaux is 52 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.