Our new silk sleeping bag liners did help to keep us warmer last night, but they tend to get twisted around every time I roll over. It also made it difficult to get up and check weather conditions outside the tent the 2 or 3 times I like to do that every night. While I’m up, I usually pee as well.
Pam has decided “we” are going to get earlier starts on this trail. By “we”, she means “Curtis” had to start getting up earlier to make coffee and boil water for the muesli before she will stick her head outside of the liner. I let her have two bowls of muesli to my one (apparently, she doesn’t want her pants back too badly). I was packed and ready to go (except for the tent which was still occupied) before she emerged. In fairness, Pam does deflate the sleeping pad and pack everything up before she comes out–I just don’t understand why it’s necessary to deflate my side of the pad at 6a while her’s stays inflated until 8; part of the mystery of living with a woman).
The trail started out easy enough today; walking along a glacial river coming down the side of the massif. We managed to get some of our best wildlife pictures of the entire trip during this walk (not that we saw any wildlife, but we got some good pics). We tried, and failed, to find an open cafe to get a good cup of coffee, but nothing, I mean nothing, was open. We didn’t see a large number of people out either. The few we did see were day hikers and even they weren’t too enthusiastic. One solo hiker passed us up when we got to the Notre Dame gorge and I could see him waffling inside. He’d take 20 steps, stop and shake his head. He did this about 3 or 4 times (it was quite steep here). I knew what was coming. He turned around and went back down to the parking lot–he obviously was not a French hiker.
Today’s section of trail was all uphill after the first 2 miles of fairly level hiking next to the river. It wasn’t too bad, just under 4000′ and we knew this would be our worst day on the circuit. In GR10 terms, this was just an average day so we had this. We thought we were on a wide section of trail until cars started passing us. It was easily a 35 degree incline and cars were passing us! This really irritated me, but as we got higher, we ran across a number of refuges (none of which were open), but apparently the lazier type of hiker drives up a couple thousand feet before getting out and hiking with their “heavy” day packs.
In the middle of the Notre Dame gorge is an amazing little waterfall of a few hundred feet in height. The river has managed to cut an arch through the rock wall over the millennia. It’s very easy to see that if you fall in this torrent, you are dead. I tried not to get too close to the edge because Pam wasn’t in the best of moods since I didn’t have any milk for her coffee.
The road finally petered out after we passed the last refuge at 5500′ where we stopped for lunch–the lunch we carried because? Yes, the refuge was closed. Now, it finally felt like we were on a real trail. Tremendous views and no cars. In retrospect, I wish we had done the high route yesterday to get away from some of the road walking. The way we did this, staying on the main route because the guy at the Office of the High Mountain was trying to scare us, was really kind of boring until now.
Even though we are carrying a map and guidebook, it doesn’t mean we are actually paying close attention to them. When we got to the first pass of the day (we only thought we had one to go over) we stopped in the warming hut to get out of the wind for a few minutes. We considered staying there, but the smell of urine was a bit too strong for my liking. At 7400′, it was quite blustery.
Imagine our surprise when we kept climbing leaving the hut instead of descending. This is when we decided that just carrying the map and book was not enough, we were going to have to start looking at them on a near daily basis. We got out the guidebook and discovered our next pass was at a little over 8100′ or almost as high as we went on the GR10 at its highest point. There’s no concern about altitude at this level, it was just a tad cool for us. I know from experience that I don’t start having problems until around 16,500 feet.
Since we hadn’t paid attention and prepared ourselves mentally for the effort to climb the second pass, we were done for the day. Just a half mile after the pass was a refuge that was still open, so we decided to cut the day short and get out of the cold for the night. We were the first people to show up and get a dorm room. Hopefully, they won’t put anyone else in with us since there should be so few people out this late in the season.
We dropped our packs and laid on our beds to relax a bit. We did hear other people come in, but hey didn’t stick them in our room. When we decided to go down and have a beer, we ran into David and Michelle, the Canadian newlyweds. We sat and talked with them until our dinner was ready. They talked us into doing the high route for the rest of this section which would take us over a pass higher than anything we did on the GR10 and wouldn’t really cost us any extra climbing since we were already at 8000′ for the night.
There were only 11 people total in the refuge tonight: the four newlyweds (which we are still going by), a French couple out for a weekend adventure, three young Israelis, and another pair of hikers that kept to themselves. There was also 5 staff members of the refuge who were getting everything ready to shut the place down in a couple of days. After 6 months, I still can’t pronounce my French well enough to even ask for “salt and pepper” without causing confusion. David speaks both French and English having grown up in a bilingual household, so he helped me out.
Poivre. I can spell it and recognize it when I hear it. I love it. You can’t get too much of it in your diet. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pronounce it correctly. I am an old dog and this is, apparently, too new of a trick for me.
