Dear All,
looking at a new area for next summers' holiday in France, Villeneuve de Berg due west of Montelimar.
Before, I've struck lucky in the Dordogne, and when buying maps ( French Blue series ) realised it was smack bang in a series of amazing GR Routes.
Before we committ to the camp site, was wondering how so sus them out?
Google Earth shows 'lines' but not sure if farm tracks or GR routes.
Any ideas on how to loocate them?
cheers
Q
I usually try searching on Wikiloc as you can refine by walking, mountainbiking, etc. Just type in the village and it will give you a whole range of routes that people have downloaded. The area around Vallon Pont D'Arc is very popular for walking and biking as far as I know, as well as the obvious Ardeche rafting and canoeing.
Pistonbroke:
thanks will nose around the site, though it seenms to have routes put on by people as opposed to the actual gr routes 'on the ground' so to speak.
but thanks anyway!
Q
or better size here
[url] http://www.geoportail.fr/?c=7.3583,48.24166&l=Scan(100)&z=7 [/url]
ps thanks frn - been trying to remember the name of that site!
on the ground, the GR routes are indicated by red and white strips next to one another.
The Frenchies seem to be fine about cyclists riding these 'long distance footpaths', although not all of them are necessarily open to cyclists.
Is this what you are after
[url] http://www.gr-infos.com/gr-fr.htm [/url]
French mapping does not easily distinguish footpaths from farm tracks - Everwhere has VTT maps so it is worth a bit of googling - tho we have learnt that even black VTT routes can be on good forest roads! The 50k mapping is no good for this - the blue 25k is better but needs a good bit of study to try to get the best out of the route.
Like singletracksurfer says, the GR routes are marked with red and white stripes next to each other.
However, local circuits could be in just about any colour.
Take these two examples. They should be viewed rotated 90%....
[img] 
[/img]
[img] 
[/img]
The first one indicates that the yellow circuit is straight on, whereas the blue and pink aren't. The second one indicates that blue and pink are straight on, yellow isn't. Indicator for left and right are pretty obvious too.
The circuits often start in a village. There'll usually be a board up near the "La Mairie". It's the same all over France. Set off on your bike, look for the paint, enjoy your ride...
Soz if i'm telling you something you already know.
SB
tho we have learnt that even black VTT routes can be on good forest roads
Yep. They seem to grade them combining length of route, elevation and pitch, nowt to do with if its by singletrack, fire road (or even tarmac in some cases I have found.)
OP, you're not really on the right track looking for GR routes to find bike trails. The GR's are long-distance paths (note that's paths, NOT footpaths!) of one type or another (local, regional, national, international...). Some of them make for great riding, some don't.
Looking for trails on a French IGN map is much the same as on an OS map at home. Off road trails are indicated by black lines. Officially, dashed lines mean "viabilité incertaine" (i.e. could be impassible) but in general I've found that solid black lines mean forest roads/landy tracks and dashed lines mean singletrack. If the lines (dashed or otherwise) are highlighted in red, this means that they are waymarked in some way and is generally a good sign that the trail will actually be there on the ground!
You can take from that advice that the first trails you should be checking out are the dashed lines with red highlighting...
You can also find a lot of info about marked bike trails on the FFC site: www.ffc.fr
Note that, as with most civilised nations, there is no footpath/bridleway type distinction in France. French land access is pretty similar to how Scottish access was a few years back (before the Land Reform Act). Basically you can go anywhere you like as long as you act responsibly and no-one tells you not to. Private land owners have the right to ban you from their land for no particular reason and the local Mayor can also pass a "arreté municipal" which may ban particular user-groups from a given trail (bikes/motocrossers/everyone!) but there has to be a sign at the trailhead.
Any GPS tracks of these routes? Recommendations for mountain bike route?
🙂
ok.....thanks for all the advice.
I'll start looking thorugh the sites listed.
many thanks
Q
You can take from that advice that the first trails you should be checking out are the dashed lines with red highlighting...
Thats the way we found our best riding - tho GR routes had good terrain as they were footpath in scale if not in access 🙂
or perhaps the OP is mixing up terms between randonee and GR
Pawsy_Bear - if if you look at Stevomcd link and follow the VTT links you will get GPS [url] http://www.ffc.fr/a_VTT/a_SitesVTT/TRACE_GPS.asp [/url] but you wont get the path / track distinction that he highlights that you get from the map
(or you can go and hoiday with him - or others on here - and save alot of toiling over maps)
Steve B thanks
Also found this site - brilliant, covers a huge area and multi sport
http://www.tracegps.com/fr/lien.htm
All this info is good to know as I'm of to see the frenchies next month.
went to Charente maritime last year and found some VTT routes marked by a yellow triangle with two circles but kept losing the trail. Bought a map this year but was disappointed to find that these routes were not marked on the map so tried following GR routes but they were useless, just sandy tracks. So I reverted to making my own routes trying to keep off-road an came across two race/randonee circuits that had been cut-in by local VTT groups....result. So if your heading in the direction of Royan/Palmyre/Etaules although it's pan flat there is some fun stuff about.
Bit of light reading for you......
[url= http://www.utagawavtt.com/ ]Utagawa.VTT[/url]
[url= http://www.1001sentiers.fr/ ]1001 Sentiers[/url]