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Bormio → Prato, South Tyrol
Stelvio Pass
Forty-eight numbered hairpins on the northern side, topping out at 2 757 m. Ride it before eight or share it with coaches.
Distance49 km
Budget / day55 €
Days1
SeasonJun–Sep
No sponsored routes, no press bikes. Notes written in the evening, in the room I paid for, about the road I rode that day — what it cost, where I slept, what it felt like.
Forty-eight numbered hairpins on the northern side, topping out at 2 757 m. Ride it before eight or share it with coaches.
A 151 km climb to 2 034 m through a glacial valley — waterfalls, a dam, and a tunnel at the top that stays cold in August.
Eight bridges hopping between skerries on the open Atlantic. Thirty-six kilometres that take an hour because you keep stopping.
From 1 027 m the road drops to the Ionian in a series of open bends with the sea filling the whole windscreen.
A toll road to 2 504 m built for the view, with 36 bends and a spur up to the Franz-Josefs-Höhe glacier terrace.
A loop through the Durmitor massif with the Tara canyon on one side — the deepest in Europe after the Grand Canyon.
The good days are never the ones you planned.
Nobody warns you that the tunnel under the ridge stays at four degrees in August. I came up the southern side sweating in a mesh jacket and rode out the other end shivering, with condensatio…
Read the note →I budgeted for fuel and forgot the water. Six ferry crossings in nine days came to 94 €, and one of them I did twice because I misread the timetable.
Read the note →Third bend below the pass, blind left-hander, and a goat standing exactly on my line. I got away with it because I was already riding as if something would be there.
Read the note →This is a log, not a guidebook. Every entry was written the night it happened, in whatever room I had, while the road was still in my hands. That is why some of it is unflattering — the pass that was shut, the guesthouse that was not worth it, the day I rode 500 km and remember none of it.
Prices are what I actually paid, in the season stated. Distances are what the odometer said, not what the map promised. If a road was disappointing, it says so.
Ask about a road, a border, or where to sleep. I answer everything, usually within a day or two — and I will say if I have not ridden something rather than guess.