THE road east out of Sörenberg rears up into a series of steep turns that climb the Glaubenbielen Pass, the high point of a road the Swiss Army punched through the Alps more than 60 years ago. Though the occasional car and bus make the journey to the top, these days much of the road belongs to cyclists.
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On a cool afternoon in mid-July I was one of them. I hadn’t ridden much all season, yet something primordial kicked in when I spied another biker just ahead. His calf muscles were swollen like Salamanca hams, and he was stooped over the bars, sweat dripping onto the pavement.
Easy pickings, I thought, as I tore after him. Within moments I’d reeled him in. He, gasping; me, hardly out of breath: I felt, well, guilty. “You’re cheating!” he panted in German as I sped by. “You’ll be out of power soon!”
He was right: I was cheating. With the mash of a button on my handlebars, a 250-watt electric motor had spun to life and increased the power of my pedal strokes by 150 percent. Suddenly I had my own domestique, a 26-volt brute that seemed to grab the saddle and shove me onward every time I pedaled. In a few minutes, I had reached the summit, taken a short walk and realized that cycling big Alpine passes with some breath to spare might not be such a bad way to cheat.
Here in the United States electric bikes are slowly becoming more popular — you can, for instance, take e-bike tours inSan Francisco and Napa Valley. In Europe, the trend is more developed with robust rental schemes in places like Britain’s Lake District, Versailles and Amsterdam. But it is the Swiss who have embraced the concept with the most imagination.
For 50 Swiss francs a day, about $62 at $1.25 to the franc (with discounts for multiple days), you can rent an electric bike from one of 400 rental stations around the country and then set out on some 5,600 miles of well-marked bike paths. With hundreds of places along the way to obtain fresh batteries free, you don’t need to be a whippet-thin racer to roll for days through the spectacular Swiss hinterlands — up steep mountain passes and past soft meadows, burbling creeks and curious cows. You’re free from unforgiving train schedules and away from the tourist hordes but still have access to all the traditional Swissness you can take at inns and restaurants along the way. And since sweating is cheap, a famously expensive country just became a little more affordable.
No doubt traditional cyclists are rolling their eyes. Electric bikes go against the very core of what makes a bike a bike, they say, and I agree. I’ve mountain biked along some of the hardest stretches of Colorado’s Continental Divide, and pedaled across Iowa (not flat, by the way), up thigh-numbing climbs in New Mexico and, yes, even across most ofSwitzerland.
THE physical accomplishment of doing those trips under my own, fleeting power certainly helped sear them into memory. With e-biking, the indelible pride of conquering my own limitations would, I know, vanish with the push of a button. But the benefits were too intriguing. Electric bikes aren’t motorcycles — I’d still find plenty of exercise and reap the pleasure of watching a country unfold beyond a novel set of handlebars. Maybe the joys would be even greater since I’d be able to look around without a burning, gasping body to distract me.
With that in mind I rented a Swiss-made Flyer C Series electric bike from the main train station in Bern. It looked like any other bike for the most part but weighed a crushing 60 pounds, a good 40 pounds more than my road bike at home. There were four power settings — high, standard, eco and no assist — controllable through a digital console mounted near the left-hand grip. A torque sensor near the cranks would tell an electric motor how much to assist me based on the power setting and how hard I was mashing on the pedals. It was no free lunch: no work, no help.
My plan was to spend four days on a 150-mile, inn-to-inn route that would take me along the rolling heart of the Emmental valley, through the Entlebuch Biosphere, and up and over a series of Alpine passes — a fine mixture of pastures, mountains and forests in regions that many foreign tourists know little about. I’d have flatlands and hills and the chance to find out whether the benefits of an electric motor outweighed its own weight.
My British friend Tom Stephens joined me on the inaugural leg toward an inn I had booked, 45 miles away in Fischbach. As it happened, we set out into driving rain.
“I suppose the weather could be worse,” he said. “It could be hailing.”
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