Aime - La Plagne

I rolled out of Aime-la-Plagne on the valley floor, past the old stone houses and the Basilique Saint-Martin, with the Isère rushing somewhere below and the N90 traffic still thick in the morning air. A few hundred metres of warm-up is all you get before the D221 tips up and the road stops being polite. This is what I came for — a climb that actually tests you, on the kind of smooth asphalt the French laid down ahead of the 2025 stage finish.

The lower ramps bite straight into the forest. Spruce and beech close over the road, the gradient settles into something honest and unforgiving, and the switchbacks start stacking on top of each other. Every now and then a gap in the trees drops the Tarentaise valley out below you, Aime shrinking into a grey smudge along the river. The tarmac is immaculate, grippy, with those fresh white edge lines you only get on a road that's just hosted the peloton. Yellow banners are still strung across the road — 25 juillet 2025 — and you climb under them like you're rolling into your own private stage.

Higher up, the forest thins and the hamlets start. Montalbert first, then the scattered chalets towards Plagne-Montalbert, wood and stone and the smell of cows somewhere off the road. This is Savoie doing what Savoie does — chapels, old barns, flower boxes at the windows, and a narrow strip of perfect black tarmac threading through it. The grade never really lets up, but the surroundings keep giving you reasons to look up from the stem.

The last push into Plagne Centre opens out into alpine meadow and larch, wildflowers along the verge, and then the ski-station concrete of the resort itself. The hairpin at Plagne Aime 2000 is decorated with polka-dot and yellow jersey façades on the Salle Omnisports Pierre Leroux — absurd, joyful, very French. I stopped at the big yellow I ❤ LA PLAGNE cyclist sculpture for the obligatory photo, then wandered over to the brasserie for a Coke and a slice of tarte aux myrtilles while my legs stopped shaking.

The descent back to Aime is the reward. Same road, same hairpins, but now you're reading them instead of grinding through them — long sightlines in the forest sections, grippy asphalt the whole way, and a rhythm you can really lean into if the road is clear.