Every per-kilometer gradient chart of Mont Ventoux from Bédoin is roughly correct and mostly useless. We have read a great many of them. The macroscopic numbers are stable across sources: 21.51 kilometres of road, 1,575 metres of vertical gain, an average gradient of 7.3 percent, a start elevation of 317 metres, a summit at 1,892 metres. Those figures are not the problem.
The problem is that the per-kilometre view — the specific representation the search term implies — is almost always drawn in a way that hides what the climb actually does to a rider, hides where the published maximum gradient of 12 percent actually lives, and hides the fact that the elevation data underneath it varies from one publisher to the next. We measured Bédoin from OpenTopoData SRTM 30m elevation data before we drew our print of it, and every time we compare that profile against the per-kilometre tables circulating online, the same three failures repeat.
What They All Get Wrong
The shared error is treating a 21.51-kilometre climb as if the one-kilometre bin were the natural unit of analysis. It is not. It is the unit of legibility on a spreadsheet.
Break Bédoin into twenty-two rows of average gradient and you get a table that looks approximately smooth. Most rows sit within a percentage point or two of the 7.3 percent overall average. A row here reads 9, another there reads 6, and the reader concludes — reasonably, from the data as presented — that the climb is uniformly hard. That conclusion is wrong in a specific way that matters.
The climb is not uniform. It is bimodal. There is a lower section between the town and the treeline where the average gradient runs well above 7.3 percent for a sustained ten-kilometre block, and there is an upper section above the treeline where the road eases but the character changes entirely. A per-kilometre average smooths across that break. It smooths across the point where the road exits the forest at Chalet Reynard and the wind starts writing the story instead of the gradient. It smooths across the specific one- to three-hundred-metre ramps inside the forest that spike well above the surrounding kilometre's average — the ramps that account for the 12 percent maximum listed by climbfinder.com but never located in the tables that reproduce the number.
That maximum is the second error. It sits in the summary line at the top of every table — Max 12% — and then never appears in the per-kilometre grid below it, because a single-figure spike inside a kilometre averaging 9 percent gets averaged down to 9 percent. The reader is told the maximum exists and shown a table that contradicts it. Both figures are technically correct. Together they mislead.
The third error is silence about the data. The number "8.4 percent for kilometre 12" is a statement with a hidden source. Is it derived from SRTM 30-metre elevation tiles, from LIDAR, from a road-book issued by a cycling federation, from a Strava consensus? Each produces a different figure. The professional way to publish per-kilometre averages is to name the elevation source and the smoothing method. Almost no one does.
What Is Almost Always Missing
Three things are absent from every per-kilometre table of Bédoin we have read, and any one of them would tell a rider more than another decimal place on the gradient column.
The first is the treeline transition as a structural feature. Ventoux is one of the very few climbs in Europe where the terrain changes from forest to lunar within the same ascent. The road exits the pine cover at Chalet Reynard and the last stretch to the summit rises across bare white limestone with no shelter of any kind. The gradient does not spike at that point — the average of the upper section is close to the overall 7.3 percent average — but the effort budget changes. The forest section is where a rider's legs go. The exposed section is where the mistral takes what remains of them. Neither of those observations is a gradient statement, which is precisely why gradient tables miss them.
The second is wind as a first-class variable. Ventoux's name essentially means the windy one. The summit routinely records mistral gusts above 100 km/h. A per-kilometre gradient of 7.5 percent above the treeline is not a per-kilometre gradient of 7.5 percent in ridden reality; it is that plus whatever the wind is doing, and for most rideable days that means an effective effort gradient several points higher than the road slope. This is not fringe context. It is why the upper Ventoux is famously the hardest section of a climb whose lower section is objectively steeper. No gradient chart will ever tell you this. The chart is not the wrong instrument; the chart is an instrument that only measures one variable.
The third is the historical mass on the road. Tom Simpson died within a short distance of the summit in the 1967 Tour de France, on the exposed section, in extreme heat. Every serious Tour de France stage that has finished on Ventoux has been settled in the exposed upper stretch, not the forested lower one — despite the lower one being where the raw gradient number is highest. There is a structural reason races have consistently settled there for six decades, and it is the same reason that recreational riders bonk there. A per-kilometre table gives you no way to see it.
What I Would Say Instead
The honest way to present Bédoin by the kilometre is to give the reader three sections and describe each on its own terms, with the overall figures — 21.51 km, 1,575 m of gain, 7.3 percent average, 317 m to 1,892 m, 12 percent published max per climbfinder.com — placed above as the frame, not the summary.
Section one is the road from the town of Bédoin up to Saint-Estève, the opening of the climb. The gradient here runs below the overall average. A rider who has done the numbers before starting will note that this section pulls the 7.3 percent figure down, which means the rest of the climb necessarily pulls it back up. Treat these kilometres as ground truth for pacing, not as the climb.
Section two is the forest, from the turn at Saint-Estève up to the treeline exit at Chalet Reynard. This is the block where every kilometre sits above the overall average, where the road tilts consistently into the high single digits and low double digits, and where the published 12 percent maximum lives — inside these kilometres, on ramps of a few hundred metres, invisible under a one-kilometre bin. This is where the climb is won or lost as a physical effort. The per-kilometre presentation, if it is done at all, should be done here at higher resolution: 200-metre or 500-metre bins, not one kilometre, with the elevation source stated.
Section three is above the treeline, from Chalet Reynard to the summit at 1,892 metres. The average gradient here returns close to the overall 7.3 percent. On paper it is the easiest section. In ridden reality it is the hardest, because the road is exposed, the altitude is highest, the shelter is gone, and the mistral is present a substantial fraction of days per year. A gradient chart of this section is a partial view. The complete view requires a weather chart layered on top of it, which no publisher does.
Two honest limits to name plainly. Our profile is derived from OpenTopoData SRTM 30m elevation data, which is a satellite-derived model with vertical noise of a few metres and horizontal resolution that will smooth out ramps shorter than about a hundred metres. We can say with confidence what the kilometre-scale character of the road is; we cannot verify the exact metre at which the published 12 percent maximum occurs. The 12 percent figure itself is a published road-book number sourced from climbfinder.com, not something we measured. When measured profile data and published road-book figures agree, we say so; when they disagree, we name each and let the reader decide. The per-kilometre chart the search term is looking for is the least useful representation of Bédoin, and once the climb is read in three sections rather than twenty-two rows, the question of which kilometre is the hardest stops being interesting — the answer is the ones you were expecting to be easier.
FAQ
What is the total length and elevation gain of Mont Ventoux from Bédoin?
The climb from Bédoin covers 21.51 kilometres of road with 1,575 metres of vertical gain, from a start elevation of 317 metres to a summit at 1,892 metres. The overall average gradient works out to 7.3 percent. Those macroscopic figures are stable across serious sources and are the ones to use when comparing Bédoin against other major European ascents. The per-kilometre distribution, which is where publishers disagree, is a separate question that a single average cannot answer.
Where does the maximum gradient of 12 percent actually appear on the climb?
The 12 percent figure is a published road-book maximum listed by climbfinder.com. It lives inside the forest section, on short ramps of a few hundred metres somewhere between the exit of Saint-Estève and the arrival at Chalet Reynard. It does not appear as a 12 percent row in one-kilometre gradient tables because a spike of that length gets averaged down against the surrounding hundreds of metres. To see it in a chart, the chart has to be drawn at 200- or 500-metre resolution, not one kilometre.
Why do per-kilometre gradient tables of Bédoin disagree with each other?
Because the underlying elevation source differs. Some publishers derive gradients from SRTM 30-metre satellite tiles, others from LIDAR, others from federation road-books, others from Strava consensus. Each produces different figures at the kilometre-by-kilometre level, and most publishers do not state which source they used or how they smoothed the data. A per-kilometre table without a stated elevation source is a number without a provenance. Read them accordingly.
Is Chalet Reynard the halfway point of the climb?
Not by distance or by elevation. Chalet Reynard sits closer to the upper part of the climb than to its midpoint. What makes it structurally important is not that it splits the climb evenly, but that it marks the transition from forest to exposed limestone. Above Chalet Reynard the average gradient eases slightly relative to the forest section below, but the character of the effort changes because there is no shelter from wind or sun for the remainder of the ascent to 1,892 metres.
How precise is SRTM 30-metre elevation data for a climb like this?
SRTM 30m is a satellite-derived digital elevation model with typical vertical noise of a few metres and horizontal resolution of thirty metres. That is sufficient to describe the kilometre-scale character of Bédoin accurately — the overall 21.51 km length, the 1,575 m of gain, the 7.3 percent average, and the shape of the climb in three sections. It is not sufficient to pinpoint the exact metre at which the road hits its maximum gradient. For that resolution a rider needs LIDAR or a high-precision on-bike measurement.
Does wind on the upper slopes really affect the effective gradient that much?
Yes, and it is the reason a nominal 7.5 percent gradient above the treeline can feel harder than a nominal 9.5 percent gradient in the forest below. Above roughly 1,600 metres the road offers no shelter and the mistral is a regular feature. A steady headwind against a rider at climbing pace adds an effort load equivalent to several percentage points of road gradient. This is why rider reports consistently identify the exposed section as the hardest part of Bédoin, even though the raw gradient number is not.
Why does the average gradient of 7.3 percent understate the climb?
Because it is the average across a bimodal profile. The opening kilometres out of Bédoin run below average, pulling the mean down; the middle block through the forest runs well above average; and the upper section above Chalet Reynard runs near average but under wind exposure that a gradient figure cannot capture. A rider pacing to the 7.3 percent number will find the middle section significantly harder than the average predicts and the upper section harder for reasons that are not gradient at all. The average is arithmetically correct and operationally misleading.