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Outside Traveler 2004
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1 2 3 

Tour de France
Take the Yellow Jersey Tour
Don't let Lance hog the fun. Here's how to ride your own epic stage of the world's greatest cycling race.

By Andrew Taber


IN COLLEGE I RODE ALPE D'HUEZ DAILY. To everyone else it was just the ho-hum two-mile climb up to our Northern California campus, but to me it was The Alpe. It was the Tour de France, and my situation was do-or-die. I may have been playing the cycling equivalent of air guitar, but I was good at it. My tattered T-shirt became the yellow jersey, and every book-toting commuter on the road before me made a target to be caught and dropped. True, I never claimed the maillot jaune. But I was never late for class.

Technically, the real Alpe d'Huez route is just a road, 8.5 miles linking the valley town of Bourg d'Oisans in the French Alps with the ski village at 6,102 feet. The bottom-to-top altitude gain, however, is a vertiginous 3,678 feet, parceled out in 21 whiplash-tight switchbacks at a hefty average gradient of 7.9 percent. Alpe d'Huez is cycling's Everest.

This year the climb may also be the last barrier between Lance Armstrong and a record sixth triumph in the world's most famous bike race. "It's a pivotal day and probably the day that will decide the Tour," the 32-year-old American said after a presentation in Paris that outlined the 2004 race route. Why? On July 21, four stages from the conclusion of the 20-stage race, the Alpe d'Huez ride will be an individual time trial—flinging cyclists one by one into a daunting race against the clock—for the first time in the Tour's 91-year history.

What exactly is the American in for? There's only one way to find out: Go. And take your bike.

The hub of the southeastern Isère region of France, a 4,617-square-mile roadie's playground blessed with one of the best mountain skylines on earth—and the ideal staging area for a challenging cycling vacation—is the animated city of Grenoble, population 157,000. Easily accessible in three hours via bullet train from Paris, Grenoble lies relatively low, held prisoner at 702 feet by three ranges of the Alps (the southwestern Vercors, northern Chartreuse, and eastern Belledonne), which spike to 9,770 feet.

Despite the thunder of its reputation, Alpe d'Huez is not the sole climb in Isère. Pick a road, any road, from Grenoble and you've hit the Alpine jackpot: snow-capped spires, immaculate mountain villages, and cow-studded plateaus with valley views aptly described as breathtaking—mostly because the terrain is vertical. But if you bonk, refueling is just a quick coast to town.

A stellar ride—and a perfect warm-up for an assault on Alpe d'Huez—is Chamrousse, a ski station at 5,414 feet, situated 18 miles from downtown Grenoble. Chamrousse staged the majority of the alpine-skiing events at the 1968 Winter Olympics, but it also has Tour de France significance: The last time the Tour featured an uphill time trial, it was here, in 2001, and Armstrong won the stage.


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