Autumn Motorcycle Tour in the Swiss Alps - Motorcycle-Journal Forums

**inspiron** · 09-12-2006, 03:01 AM

I am a member of a group of active and retired volunteer fire-fighters from the town where I live. We organize, among other things, an annual motorcycle day tour. In June this year, during the tour, we decided to organize a second tour, this time over an entire weekend.
This past weekend was our first 48 hour motorcycle tour around Switzerland.

We left our town (in north-western Switzerland) on Friday evening around 6pm. There were 8 of us on 7 bikes, covering a wide spectrum of the biking world: An older Honda CBR 600 with over 60 thousand kilometers on the clock, a newer Honda CBR Fireblade, a Buell, Harley Sporster 883, Aprilla touring, my Suzuki GSX 1400 and a brand new Sachs MadAss 125.

The first leg of the journey took us south toward Hasliberg, where we had dinner and spent the night. The first leg was pretty good, except for the occasional fog bank. If you don’t ride twisty mountain roads too often, I really wouldn’t recommend riding them at night in fog. Let’s just call this an "advanced" riding experience.

The route

Saturday – 7 Passes

Saturday morning we all got up, had breakfast, and mounted up for a serious attack on the Swiss Alps. Tom (riding the Buell) had planned the tour, and had 7 Alpine passes on the map for the day. We headed for the Grimsel pass, then over the Furka pass towards Andermatt. The on toward the Oberalppass, around to the Lukmanierpass down toward Bellinzona, then up the San Bernardino pass, through Splügen and over the Splügenpass into northern Italy, down toward Chiavenna and back up the Malojapass where we stopped for he evening. It sounds like a huge ride … and it was. This was no iron-butt ride, since we only really covered about 200 miles, but most of these were hairpin turns and twisty roads, usually high above the tree line. At the lowest point on Saturday we were about 1000 feet above sea level, and at the highest peak, we were just under 8000 feet!

Altitude (in meters above sea level)

I had a large soft-luggage set from Bags Connection mounted on my bike. At first, some of the others laughed about this huge luggage set I had mounted. By the middle of the day Saturday, I was carrying stuff for 4 different people. The one girl who was riding pillion (on the Fireblade) was complaining about sore shoulders, since she was wearing a heavy backpack and always leaning to the side to look around her boyfriend’s head. So she packed everything into my luggage … and no one laughed anymore about these huge bags.

Lesson Learned

One bit of wisdom that I had taken with me paid off BIG TIME. "Always carry a spare key!" Earlier this summer, I had two spare keys made, and was using one of these my main key. I kept the original key in my jacket pocket. We stopped to fill the tank on Saturday, and I flipped up my tank bag so I could get to the tank cap. I stuck my key in the tank cap and reached over to grab the pump hose as the tank bag dropped back down onto the tank. “No big deal, this happens all the time,” I thought. I pushed the bag back up to find the top of the key lying next to the tank cap, and the rest is broken clean off in the lock. Before I could even finish saying “FU…!” one the others was over with a Leatherman and pulled out the rest of the key, while asking “you’ve got a spare, right?” I smiled, reached in my pocket, pulled out the spare and proceeded to fill up. The rest of the group had a funny look on their faces – you could see that I was the only one who thought to bring a spare key. I’m sure a few of them will be carrying one next time!

Sunday – The long ride home

Saturday night was spent in Majora. We got up Sunday morning, had some breakfast at the hotel, and took off for the long journey home. We started off toward St. Moritz, over the Albulapass, through Bergün and Davos, then up through Flums and back down through Glarus heading for the Klausenpass. The Klausenpass is unique – you head up some extreme twisty roads with tight hairpin turns, and eventually you enter a long plateau high up in the mountains. There are hundreds of cows grazing, and there are no fences. The cows will simply wander across the road, so you need to ride carefully to avoid hitting a cow (or something it may have left on the road). After more than a mile across this plateau, there is another set of tight hairpins up then down toward another valley. This is absolutely wild – you are riding along a narrow, twisty street (okay, so there are lots of signs warning that it’s a dangerous stretch of road) with a solid wall of stone on one side, and more than 2000 feet drop on the other. The view into the valley is just mind-blowing. Sadly, I couldn’t take any pictures at this point, since I was concentrating on not being killed by cars and busses coming the other way.

After coming down from the Klausenpass we headed for the city Zug and the road toward Aargau. This is about 30 miles of flat country road through a bunch of small towns – terribly boring after spending 2 days on twisty mountain passes. In Aargau, we picked up the Autobahn for the last few miles back home.

In 50 hours (from 6pm Friday to 8pm Sunday) we covered 884 km (550 miles). Actual saddle time was just over 15 hours, so we averaged about 58 km/hour (36 mph). This was a very good pace, considering that many of these kilometers were on tight, twisty roads where high speeds are simply impossible.

My Suzuki performed wonderfully. Thanks to the fuel injection engine (and my K&N air filter), I noticed almost no performance differences between 1000 and 8000 feet. The carbureted bikes (most notably the Harley and Buell) were noticeably rougher at the high altitudes.

The little Sachs 125 set the pace, too. It had the smallest tank and the shortest range, so we had to stop for fuel every 140 km (90 miles). We all rode the twisties at our own pace, and those who were a bit quicker simply waited at the peak or wherever we turned off to another road. Martin, riding the big Aprilla touring bike, was happy to take over as the last rider of the group, so when we saw Martin in our mirrors, we knew that the whole group was together.

Ignoring the bit of fog on Friday evening, the weather over the weekend was perfect. It was a bit cool up in the mountains and a bit too warm as we got down into Italy, but overall it was fine. Most importantly, it didn’t rain or snow on us.

Indeed a fine weekend on two wheels.

Photos

I've posted over 100 pictures from the tour on our club website: Club Florian '94 - Fotos - Töffausfahrt - September 2006