Mont Ventoux

Mont Ventoux stands alone, which is why it looks so much bigger than 1,909 metres. There is no range around it, only the Vaucluse plain and vineyards, and then this pale hulk with a tower on top. The last few hundred metres are bare limestone scree, stripped when the slopes were cut over for timber and charcoal in earlier centuries and never fully recovered, and from a distance that white ground reads convincingly as snow in the middle of August. Replanting from the nineteenth century put cedar and pine back on the lower flanks. The mistral hits the summit hard enough to make standing upright a problem, and the name is not a coincidence.

History

In the 10th century the mountain was called both Mons Ventosus and Mons Ventorius, and the mistral has driven winds at the summit up to 320 km/h. People probably climbed it in prehistory, but the first recorded ascent was by the philosopher Jean Buridan before 1334, on his way to the papal court at Avignon, to make weather observations, and on 26 April 1336 Petrarch wrote his famous, perhaps fictional, account of climbing it with his brother. A chapel of the Holy Cross was built on the top in the 15th century, a weather station was built on the summit in 1882 with a carriage road planned in 1879, a hill climb for cars and motorcycles was run on its roads from 1902 to 1976, and a 50-metre telecommunications mast went up in the 1960s (Wikipedia, Mont Ventoux).

The landscape

• The white summit - bare limestone scree that reads as snow from the plain below.
• The Bedoin climb - twenty-one kilometres of road that cyclists treat as a test piece.
• The cedar forest - nineteenth-century plantings on the southern flank.
• The plain below - the Rhone valley, the Dentelles de Montmirail and the Vaucluse.

When to go

The summit road usually opens once the snow clears, generally in spring, and closes again with the first heavy falls. June to October is dependable. Go early: haze builds through the day and so does the wind. Expect the top to be ten or more degrees colder than Carpentras, whatever the forecast says down there.

Practical notes

The summit is a car park with masts, a weather station and a kiosk, not a wild place. On summer weekends the road is a slow line of cars overtaking cyclists on blind bends. Wind closes it outright at times. The long view is often lost in haze, and the cycling ascent has almost no shade on the Bedoin side.

Nearby

Sault and its lavender fields lie east; the Dentelles de Montmirail are just west.

Key facts