Sculpting the Seine River Trail

A river is an invitation to travel, a reptilian receptacle of a million stories, a living, majestic guideline to new places. This is the starting point of an adventure. The Seine River Trail is 859 kilometres long. We are a trio of travellers – two Parisians and a Dijonnais; Sophie, Pierre-Charles and Camille.

The desire to create an adventure accessible to gravel and bikepacking enthusiasts along the Seine brought us together. We wanted to somehow become part of the landscape too. This is a long-term project, and so nothing has been left to chance when creating it.

Sculpting the Seine River Trail - Sophie Gateau

There is a bike lane that runs along the Seine, intended for cyclists, but our objective is to establish an alternative route, using rustic paths and roads, suitable for a gravel route from Dijon up through Paris to Le Havre at the river’s mouth. One that allows divergences from the banks of the river to better return there later, to find a point of view in height or to escape the motorised traffic. The route less taken.

The trail starts in Dijon, the historic capital of Burgundy, with the sources of the Seine a few kilometres away. The symbolic start of this adventure is a sculpture of the goddess Sequana, nymph of the sources of the river, she will be our muse. The eastern part of the route, between Paris and Dijon, was directly inspired by a bikepacking event organised and piloted by Pierre-Charles.

July, this section becomes an incentive to ride the Seine River Trail, and so we ride it together for a few days, in good spirits. After a few adjustments to the existing route, we only have half of the full distance from Paris to Le Havre left to plot.

We take advantage of the long winter evenings to trace the missing 400 km. We are on well-documented ground to imagine the crossing through Paris, but the rest of the route remains abstract. Despite an in-depth study of the maps, the recommendations left by other users on Komoot and the listing of the points of interest of the different regions crossed, we must check in real-time whether what we have imagined corresponds to our expectations.

The first major reconnaissance will take place in mid-December, in the opposite direction, from the port of Le Havre moving southeast to Mantes-la-Jolie. The days are short in winter, the temperatures are negative. The spectacle of frost in the Normandy fields and the mist rising from the river delights us every day, however, despite the biting cold. We are riding against the tide, with Paris as our goal, along unknown paths and tracks.

Most of the terrain that we had imagined from looking at the screen pixels turns out to be what we hoped for. Some parts need to be completely reinvented though. Our method consists of taking out our phones, analysing the map on the Komoot app, separating so that everyone explores a different path and meeting a few kilometres further to combine our impressions and our feelings. If the alternative route is too technical, we choose to eliminate it, if it is too easy or uninteresting, we continue to look for another route. For some parts of the recce, more than four passes will be necessary for us to be satisfied.

The Seine is a permanent state of tension between wild nature, landscapes that have inspired so many modern painters and brutal manufacturing and industry, especially oil. On the section that we survey from Le Havre, it is the refineries and the oil tankers that punctuate the landscape. The Seine is very wide near its mouth and the bridges that span it are few and far between. We choose to pass the track through the ferries that transport pedestrians, cyclists and cars from one bank to the other. Crossing the river by boat offers a new dimension and another rhythm to the journey, connecting us even more to the flow of the Seine.

A river hollows out the landscape, shapes it. The Seine has sculpted our bike course wonderfully. We alternate between towpaths and forest tracks located on the plateaus at the top of the banks. The Norman villages with their typical architecture and thatched roofs appear on these clifftops, also offering us welcome breaks in the village cafés. At the end of spring and after multiple round trips from Paris to check the latest route options, the course is finally ready.

A weekend with some friends riding the route ‘blind’ allows us to validate the recent modifications and to collect the first impressions of other bikepacking enthusiasts. The vegetation has changed dramatically since those naked and frozen winter days. We rediscover our very own hand-drawn route with unbridled pleasure, the line we have sculpted, like the statue of Sequana, with our bodies and minds. Everyone is delighted with the kilometres that we have helped them discover. We can finally launch this route publicly. Mission accomplished.

Seine River Trail is an 859 km track that follows the Seine from near or far. It is public and free.

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