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 339 km round trip from Clairvaux-les-Lacs - roughly 5 h 54 in the saddle. It goes by way of From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai, Fortifications of Vauban, Le Locle and back through Fortifications of Vauban. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 900 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It crosses from France into Switzerland - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules. The line favours views over speed.
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 57 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 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 94 km into the recorded legs you reach Fortifications of Vauban. Next is Le Locle.
Le Locle, high in the Swiss Jura near the French border, is a town built for making watches. After a series of fires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was rebuilt on a grid of parallel streets, with houses and workshops designed to let maximum light into the rooms where watchmakers worked at their benches. The town, with neighbouring La Chaux-de-Fonds, was listed by UNESCO in 2009 as an example of urban planning shaped entirely by a single industry. Tissot was founded here in 1853, Zenith in 1865, and many smaller firms continue the tradition. Daniel JeanRichard, a goldsmith who is said to have founded the Jura watch industry, worked here in the eighteenth century.
Read the complete Le Locle write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Le Locle, about halfway. 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.
back through Fortifications of Vauban sits at 243 km, about halfway. 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 comes up about 287 km into the recorded legs. 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.
Le Grand Lac de Clairvaux closes the day.
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 → Fortifications of Vauban is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fortifications of Vauban → Le Locle is 76 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Le Locle → back through Fortifications of Vauban is 75 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
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 → Le Grand Lac de Clairvaux is 52 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.