SYMPATHY FOR THEDEVIL

Towns and villages have springs flowing with superclear mountain run-off

A heat haze billows from the tarmac ahead of me, distorting the climb ahead. Tall pines flank the road while the jagged white peaks of the 4,000m-plus Swiss Alps loom behind me. The Weisshorn and its sister peaks send mighty ridgelines to spear the sky, as their scalloped white flanks cast the summer sun back into the stratosphere.

They look like the titanic tools of ancient gods, wielded to carve out the heavens, rather than geological structures. It’s easy to Disneyfy Switzerland as a land of Toblerone, yodelling and conspicuous devotion to cheese, but today’s ride, from the mountain resort of Crans Montana and up the 2,252m Col du Sanetsch, is reminding me just how primal and wild this country can be.

Here, the mountain comes to meet you on the road. Towering slabs of rock, dotted with stubborn, gravity-defying evergreens, march alongside the ribbon of roadway, occasionally firing tumultuous waterfalls down their screescattered gulleys. It’s a landscape that always seems on the verge of stretching out to erase the footholds