Day 16 Lermoos to Prutz

Today started off dry but cold, we had a mile or so of fairly flat country and then started up the Fernpass. The main road was very busy but the cycle path, the Via Claudia Augusta ( or Via Cloudier Augusta as we know it) is almost all off road over this pass.  The climb was steep but steady on good forest roads.

And the view over the other side at the top was amazing with the road twisting away hundreds of feet below us.

By this time the rain had come on so it was on with all the waterproofs again and off for some proper downhill mountain biking. Initially it was fast forest track, although we couldn't afford to pick up too much speed with a full load on.  Then it was into some proper single track with rocks, wet roots , cows and horses to negotiate!

Even with a full load it was still all rideable, although I wouldn't have liked to have been going in the other direction.  I was also glad that my back tyre had packed in yesterday as it would certainly never have survived today.  

We stopped at Nassereith for coffee and apple strudel, it was really cold at this point (about 9 degrees and chucking it down) so we had to put some more layers on.  A short uphill section soon warmed us up so we carried on through Imst (tricky navigation again), Landeck and on part way up the Reschen Pass to Purtz.  Despite it raining all day we've really enjoyed it, it would have been much nicer to have had better views, but it was a really good route and we felt really good on the hills.

We've now used up the second of our three spare days, we had originally hoped to do a bonus loop of the Stelvio Pass if we had been on time and the weather had been good, since neither of those have happened it looks like we'll need to give it a miss (this time!)

Today's miles 45

Total miles 888

Today's ascent 2765 feet

horses passed at very close range - too many!!!!