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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
They look like the titanic tools of ancient gods, wielded to carve out the heavens, rather than geological structures.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to cast Switzerland as a Disneyland of Toblerone, yodelling and conspicuous devotion to cheese, but this 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.<\/p>\n
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 scree-scattered gulleys.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a landscape that always seems on the verge of stretching out to erase the footholds of civilisation.<\/p>\n
You get the feeling we don\u2019t really belong here, which makes riding up to meet the mountains an intimidating prospect.<\/p>\n
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