The Col d'Izoard and the Casse Déserte

Required Activities

• Take one of the two named ascents to the col at 2,362m — 19.1 km at 6 per cent from the Queyras roundabout on the north side, or the 31.6 km at 4.4 per cent from Guillestre on the south — and mark the point a kilometre below the summit, at the refuge Napoléon at 2,282m, where the larch forest stops and the bare rock begins

• Park on the Casse Déserte and walk out onto the screes at about 2,220m: pick up a handful of the frost-shattered debris and see how evenly sized the fragments are, then follow one of the cargneule pinnacles up with your eye from the scree it stands in to the crête de Coste Belle feeding it

• Walk the short distance below the Casse Déserte, on the Briançon side, to the monolithic rock that carries the two bronze plaques to Louison Bobet and Fausto Coppi, and read both names off the stone

• At the top, find the memorial raised in 1934 to général Berge, whose engineers cut this road between 1893 and 1897, then look back down the southern hairpins and work out how much of the Casse Déserte you can see from the col itself