I believe it was in the summer of 2020 when I went for a run from Serfaus to St. Georgen. To my surprise, I noticed that the road that turns right just before St. Georgen towards Tschupbach in the valley was being asphalted. This is fantastic for cyclists because it suddenly provides an additional route to climb to Serfaus. Moreover, it passes through a very quiet and beautiful area, a complete contrast to the busy and unattractive main road from Ried to Serfaus. In the winter of 2018, there were several landslides on both the road from Ried to Ladis and the road to Serfaus/Fiss, causing both to be closed and the towns to become inaccessible. A temporary road through the fields was then constructed to get the stranded tourists off the mountain. This caught my attention at the time because I knew that you could also descend from Serfaus via St. Georgen and Tschupbach, although the last part was a gravel road. I couldn’t find much information about it, but it seems that after that winter, the decision was made to asphalt that last section, thus providing a fully paved access road to Serfaus. Normally, this road is closed to cars, but cyclists can certainly use it.
Knowing that the road had been asphalted, I decided on my first vacation ride (summer 2022) to descend via Ladis and then climb back up to Serfaus via Tschupbach. In the valley, there is a beautiful rolling road from Ried to Pfunds (not the main road). Along the way, you pass through Tösens, and immediately after, you cross the Inn River on a wooden bridge. About 400 meters further at Gasthof & Restaurant Tschuppbach, the climb begins with a turnoff on the right side of the road. For context – it was about 32 degrees Celsius in the valley, and I was eager to ride into the likely cooler forest. I had previously run down this first section, which was gravel at the time, but I couldn’t remember how steep it was. I quickly found out!
This year, I was equipped with a compact crank and a gear ratio of 34×28. With that, I thought I could handle everything easily. I was already using it right from the start of the climb, and in the first kilometer, I was almost completely parked while sweat was pouring down my forehead. It was probably a combination of the heat and the steepness, but I was actually amazed. I hadn’t cycled in the mountains for a while, but was it always this hard? I was completely stopped and could hardly move forward. After about two kilometers, you reach the ‘old’ road to St. Georgen/Serfaus. In the beginning, it is quite steep, but it gradually becomes less steep.
In hindsight, I checked Strava. And what do you know – that first steep part of the climb, about 1.7 kilometers long, turns out to be a Strava segment with an average gradient of 16.1%! That explains a lot! And that’s also the allure of this climb; it starts off intense with very steep sections and hairpin bends and gradually flattens out the higher you go. The road offers a very attractive alternative to the main road to Fiss and Serfaus. You might encounter the occasional car, and there is some debris on the road here and there, but apart from that, it’s worth taking this road and it’s an asset to the area. The statistics: the climb is a total of 5.5 kilometers long (with the endpoint being the junction with Dorfstrasse in Serfaus). Tschuppbach is at 924 meters and the endpoint at 1440 meters. This means you overcome a height difference of 516 meters, resulting in an average gradient of 8.4%.
