Planning and Closures

This all started as spending a few days driving down from North West England to the South of France over a few days. We haven't visited the Alps for many years and had fond memories of Alpine meadows full of flowers in summer and recollections of going through recently opened passes in the Pyrenees through banks of snow in June which we guessed may be similar in the Alps.

Lynne came across the "Route des Grandes Alpes", a route from Thonon les Bains on Lake Geneva (Lac Leman) crossing many Alpine passes down to Menton on the French Mediterranean coast  close to Italy. It seemed an ideal route for us and we set about checking distances and routes and finding places to stay.

The Rte. des Gnd. Alpes does not seem to be laid down firmly in all opinions but we found what seemed to be the intended itinerary and worked from that. It is seemingly popular with cyclists and motor cyclists as well as driving and many people suggest diversions to off route places of interest.

We had started booking accommodation when we became aware that several passes (Cols) were still closed to traffic. Further investigation revealed that even when we are travelling at the end of May some passes would still not be open.  It became apparent that we may end up just going from hotel to hotel via diversions out of the mountains and back and do little high pass travel.

We had great difficulty getting reliable information on this with many contradictory sites even ones which appeared to be current. However, we eventually settled on several traffic sites associated with Department websites as follows.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
TO BE UPDATED IN NEXT FEW DAYS!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
These appeared to be current and informative as detail would change sometimes from days to day.
Over the days before we left, several Cols moved from Closed to Ouvert or less obstructed but as we left, three key cols were still showing closed meaning that we have to plan for changed routes on days 2 and 3.
Col de l'Iseran (day 2)
Col du Galibier (day 3)
Col d'Izoard (day 3)