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 317 km round trip from Herrliberg - roughly 4 h 41 in the saddle. It goes by way of Egolzwil 3, Forêt de la Bettlachstock and back through Egolzwil 3. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 950 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available.
71 km on Egolzwil 3 → Forêt de la Bettlachstock.
Under the calm surface of Lake Zurich, just off the shore at Erlenbach, lie the remains of villages that people built here more than five thousand years ago. The site called Winkel is one of the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, a UNESCO site of more than a hundred settlements, and here, as elsewhere on the lake, archaeologists diving in the shallow water have found wooden piles, pottery, tools and food remains preserved in the mud. There is nothing to see from the shore, only the water and the reeds, but it is fascinating to think that the people who farmed and fished here in the Neolithic chose the same sunny slope that, thousands of years later, would become known as the Gold Coast.
Read the complete Winkel write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Winkel is where the day begins. Next is Egolzwil 3.
Archaeologists named a whole Neolithic culture after Egolzwil, a small village in the canton of Lucerne, because the settlements found in the Wauwiler Moos, a former lake turned into peat bog, revealed a way of life older than anything else known in the region at the time. Egolzwil 3, one of these sites, was a village of farmers who lived on the shore of a small lake over six thousand years ago, and it counts as one component of UNESCO's inscription of prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps. The lake was drained in the nineteenth century to create farmland, and the remains were preserved in the wet peat.
Read the complete Egolzwil 3 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Egolzwil 3 comes up about 87 km into the recorded legs. Next is Forêt de la Bettlachstock.
Above the watchmaking towns of Grenchen and Bettlach, the first chain of the Jura rises like a wall out of the Aare plain, and on its steep southern flank grows the beech forest of the Bettlachstock. In 2021 it became one of the Swiss components of the UNESCO Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe, a serial site that stretches across the continent to show how beech spread after the last Ice Age. What makes this patch special is that it has been left largely to itself for decades, on slopes so steep and rocky that nobody bothered to log them hard, and so the trees grow old, fall, rot and feed the next generation.
Read the complete Forêt de la Bettlachstock write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 158 km into the recorded legs you reach Forêt de la Bettlachstock. Next is back through Egolzwil 3.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Egolzwil 3 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Egolzwil 3, late in the day. Next is Winkel.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Winkel write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Winkel. That is the ride.
Winkel → Egolzwil 3 is 87 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Egolzwil 3 → Forêt de la Bettlachstock is 71 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Forêt de la Bettlachstock → back through Egolzwil 3 is 72 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Egolzwil 3 → Winkel is 86 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.