November, and the fog had sat on the lakes at home for days. So I drove up out of it to the Jura and rode a 131km loop above it: La Chaux-de-Fonds, Saint-Imier, the 9% wall up Mont-Soleil and Bellelay, the last two hours in the dark. My Strava challenge for the month, done.
Anyone who has lived on the Swiss Plateau in autumn knows the fog. In November a layer of cold air settles over the lowlands and the lakes and just stays there, sometimes for a week or more, grey and damp, while a few hundred metres higher the sun is shining. My note from Saturday 29 November 2014: "A blanket of fog sits in the area were we live and stays for days. Decided on a trip to Saignelgier for the challenge this month. Last 2 hours completed in the dark..."
The loop starts at Les Reussilles, near Tramelan in the Bernese Jura, on the high plateau at about 1,000m, and stays up there for most of the day. It goes west to La Chaux-de-Fonds, the watchmaking city whose grid of streets, laid out round the watch industry, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with neighbouring Le Locle, then over to Saint-Imier in the valley below Chasseral.
From Saint-Imier the road climbs Mont-Soleil, the hill above the town, which you can also reach by funicular to 1,180m. The summit, at 1,291m, has an observatory, a solar park and wind turbines, the tallest of them 150m high. On the way home the route passes Bellelay, home of the old abbey where the Tête de Moine cheese was first made.
40kmrolling, about 1,000m up
20.6km+212mto 1,206m
7.7km−389m
16 min
4.5km+420m9.3% average
35kmlosing the light
23kmafter sunset
I set off from Les Reussilles at 10:57, in 7°C and sunshine above the cloud, and rode west across the plateau through Les Bois to La Chaux-de-Fonds, 40km of rolling road at around 1,000m. From there it was a long, gradual drag up to La Juillarde at 1,206m, and a quick descent into Saint-Imier at 14:23 for a quarter-hour stop.
Then the hardest bit of the day: Mont-Soleil, straight up from the town. It's only 4.5km, but it climbs 420m at an average of 9.3%. After that the route runs along the tops and home via Bellelay, and in late November the light goes early: the last two hours were ridden in the dark. Back at Les Reussilles at 18:01 with 131.3km, 2,246m and six hours of riding, the longest ride on any of the Jura pages. Challenge completed.
There are no photos from this one.