Chamonix, France: the first weekend adventure

-

 

Scenery just above the hut

We always new that we were arriving in Chamonix at an odd time of year, at the tail end of the summer hiking and trail running season, and before the winter sports season.  And so it was that one of the last remaining open refuges had its final weekend the day after we arrived.  We gambled on the weather, booked a night, and won!  Big time.  This is one of the most spectacular mountain environments anywhere, and I simply cannot imagine better weather than we had.  Cool, clear air, and wall to wall sunshine.  I will let the pictures tell that story.

The little red train that pulls you 1000m up the mountain

One of my favourite pictures of the year: Felicity loves hiking and is really strong

The glacier

It wasn't all smiles, but there were plenty


At the top of the Le Signal, 2204m

Grand balcon nord, hugging the southern wall of the valley

Grand balcon nord with hiker (Crystal)

Arriving at the hut

The hut is 1000m above Chamonix town and we knew we would be tired from travel and acclimatising to the altitude, so we gave ourselves a fighting chance by taking the little red train up to Montenvers before carrying on up to Le Signal so that we could enjoy the Grand Balcon Nord, as it contours along the valley wall at 2200m, to the Refuge de Plan de l'Aiguille.  It was breathtakingly beautiful.  

We knew that the hut would be full although we were the first to arrive at 4pm.  We celebrated with hot chocolate and coffee looking over the valley, and met Belle, the refuge dog.  Before dinner we hiked a little way up towards the cable car station, built rock towers and soaked up the perfect day.  The dining room is a cozy spot hanging right over the valley, and with 35 people squeezed in it had the classic congeniality of a mountain hut, full of people high on fresh air, altitude and perhaps a few bottles of vin rouge.  Dining was an extravaganza of soup, bread, cheese, gateaux de pomme de terre, baked tomatoes, beef stew, and tart.

Our home for the night, 2207m

A good old bowl of choc chaud

Table with a view

Dining room with a view

After a not particularly restful night we drank up more troughs of hot chocolate and coffee before starting the hike straight down the mountain and back to Chamonix, taking in a quick detour to check out the kids new school before they start tomorrow.  There will be some sore legs in the coming days.  

Sunrise looking down the valley towards Argentiere

We were trying to recreate a picture of Felicity playing in a water trough in Switerland when she was 18 months old, but it was much colder here!

Saying good bye to Belle. The kids make friends with dogs really quickly; I guess we all do

Refuge de Plan de l'Aiguille

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Alpine cycling adventure - Part II

-
Image
Day 6 - Barcelonnette to St Dalmas, 123 km (76 mi) Cols passed: Col de Cayolle (2326 m), Col de la Couillole (1678 m) Despite the brooding skies we left Barcelonnette cheered by dry shorts, confidence that we were within touching distance of our goal and enjoying the atmospheric effect of the wispy mist, high clouds and soft sunlight. Our hopes for the newly adapted route were met and surpassed as we wound our way up a stunning gorge towards Col de Cayolle. Despite a brief hailstorm as we approached the col we stayed dry and enjoyed a pit-stop and blankets amongst the snow pack on the col before negotiating over 1500 m of patchy wet descent to Guillames at 793 m. The high Alps now behind us we climbed back up through the ski resort of Valberg and on to the Col de la Couillole up at 1678 m and rolled back down to 500 m where we expected to spend the night. Our ever-supportive support team had other ideas however and let us know by way of text message that they had found a fantastic ca...
Read more

Rafting the Rio Maipo

-
Image
  Feb 5th -  Sometimes travelling is hard, and I have moaned a bit about how covid has made everything harder. But sometimes it's just pure fun.  Not to say that everything about our day out rafting was plain sailing. To begin with we had to get everyone on board (have you ever noticed how many of our idioms come from nautical activities? Ask me sometime about freezing the balls off a brass monkey...).  I enjoyed the water as a kid but I never went white water rafting until I was a fully grown person. I can see how it could be intimidating. We found Natexplora who said they ran kids trips and that was enough to sway the doubters. The fact that we ran the same route as the other six adult-only rafts on our trip was fortunately lost in the joy and thrill of the moment. There is a project to divert water from the Maipo through a hydroelectric tunnel. Apparently, this will reduce the flow of Maipo by 90%. We had heard of this scheme, and we saw these signs, although the ...
Read more

10 December days in England

-
Image
Swiss air brought us to England (Apologies for the formatting issues). My six oldest friends live in England, within around 20 miles of each other, along with their six partners and 14 children.  We haven't been to England in the winter in nearly a decade. It was unsurpsingly grey and somewhat surprisingly very dark, very early.  Ottawa is on the same latitude as Rome.  Our "true North" is suprisingly far south.  All of this English gloom was no equal to the congenial cheer that was in full flow in the run up to Christmas - the sunshine of friendship radiating through the pale fog.  We had a very smooth taxi-bus-plane-taxi trip from Chamonix back to Woking and were settled just in time to wave our generous hosts, Nick and Agnes, off to London for their Van Gogh and Shard dinner engagements to celebrate the anniversary of their first date.  We were comfortably house bound for the first couple of days awaiting what else but a covid test result.  When it...
Read more