July 24, 2024

Les Houches to Les Contamines

13.3 miles

Today is the day! We are off to start the TMB and discover what this alpine circuit has in store. After another extravagant RockyPop breakfast, we pack up and walk back down to the main square for photos at the official start sign. There’s another woman there who excitedly asks us to take photos of her in many configurations, and her excitement starts to seep into me. There’s nothing like the feeling of being at the beginning of a hike. After our own photos, we officially begin the Tour du Mont Blanc.

Grace tells me that there’s a lot of road walking today, which certainly seems to hold true even as we begin. We follow the road through Les Houches and up to a wooden set of stairs that wastes no time in going straight up the side of the hill. Within minutes I’m already wondering about the vertical gain on this hike and how I’m going to survive it. Grace is ahead of me and I’m thinking, dang, she’s a fast runner, so of course she’s going to be a fast hiker. But I have to just plod along at my little tortoise pace or else I am going to burn out fast. I revert to my good old 100 steps trick as the trail crosses some neighborhoods, combining road with gravel and soft tread. Count to 100 on the uphill, breathe. Repeat.

We pass multiple ski runs and under a gondola and the novelty, the sheer Alps-ness of it, tickles me. I learned to ski in Indiana, okay? We’re lucky to even have chairlifts, let alone a gondola.

We continue to meander around the ski area as we climb up, up, up. I keep doing my 100 steps trick and I look around me on the breaks. By now Les Houches is a tiny little collection of buildings and roads down in the valley and the mountains are dominating my view.

We soon pass a restaurant on our left and go under a chairlift. I get thinking about how cool it must be to ski here in the winter, how many options of runs to go down, and also how this restaurant probably makes a killing all year because just about when the ski season ends, the TMB hikers arrive. Then a pun pops in my head.

“I gondo-love this place!” I say aloud with zero context.

“Here today, gondola tomorrow,” Grace replies without missing a beat.

“That’s definitely today’s title.”

We reach Col de Voza, the end of our climbing for this part of the day, and snag a picnic table facing Mont Blanc for lunch. It’s a delightful day with just a slight breeze and I revel in my French bread and slimy cheese lunch while I stare at the mountains.

We begin our descent after this point. The trail wraps around a sort of grassy area and provides even more amazing views up towards the namesake mountain. Then there is a refuge on our right, and it looks so nice, with chairs and a piped spring outside on a perfectly green lawn. We pop in for a moment to ask if they have passports, and they do! We each get one, and Grace gets a TMB buff as well.

The passport is so stinking cute. Each two-page spread represents a stage of the hike, and it has the elevation illustrated with points of interest along the way. Somewhere on each page is an illustration of an animal and a tip for etiquette in the mountains in both French and English. It is objectively the coolest design for a trail passport I’ve ever seen and I am beyond stoked.

The sharp downhill continues after this and soon we are on a road. I can still see up to the enormous mountains and the rocky, grassy flanks.

“I bet there are all the marmots up there,” I say wistfully. “King Marmot.”

“King Marmot and the Marmot Armament,” Grace offers, echoing the absurd name of my favorite band.

“That’s amazing. What else rhymes with marmot?”

She thinks for a bit. “King Marmot and the Incarnate Garment.”

“Or garnet?”

“King Marmot and the Incarnate Garnet!”

This somehow leads me to telling Grace about the video with the names of American restaurants but they’re said wrong, like “McNaldo’s: I like the it!” This sends us both into a fit of laughter which results in me getting the hiccups. Grace tries to scare me a few tenths of a mile later, but without success. Ah, well. They eventually go away.

We soon come upon the town of Bionnassay, which kind of sounds like Beyoncé, which I think distracts us and sends us down the wrong road and makes us get off trail by almost a mile. When we notice this oops, we’ve come a long way downhill and do not want to go back up, but Grace puts on some music (Charli xcx, “Jeffrey Bezos” from Bo Burnham’s Inside, which we’d been singing earlier, and some Big Booty Mix) and we power back up the winding road until we’re once again on track. On the bright side, we get to walk past a llama twice!

Once we find the trail again, it takes us into the woods on proper dirt trail and towards a raging river spanned by a bridge. We take a photo of a group of hikers and then quickly hop ahead of them onto the trail. On the other side of the river the trail is also really trail, PCT-style hard-packed switchbacky trail through a forest with moss! It’s lovely, but I’m also conscious of the group behind me and I hate leapfrogging so I try to power up it as much as I can.

Not long after this lovely trail, we make a right and turn down a very flat, very consistently wide dirt path that turns into a road. At the next town, Le Champel, we learn that this is a Roman road! (Me: “The Romans do be building roads.” Grace: “The Romans do be roaming.”) Le Champel has some lovely little chalets with flowers out front as well as a piped spring where we refill our water. The architecture here is endlessly interesting to me, and I’m loving these little piped springs with troughs made of logs.

We follow the TMB down a steep switchback and it turns to gravel road, spits us out into another town with another lovely spring right in the center of the square, and up an exposed road towards another collection of buildings. I am suddenly, out of nowhere, extremely hot and hungry. We find some shade and take a break in it, wherein I consume many oeufs au plat gummies and some chips.

Following the trail up again, we make a turn and cross a river and find ourselves once again in some lovely woods, mixed conifers on the side of a steep slope that remind me of the PCT. (I can’t help it. Things just remind me of the PCT.) The real trail doesn’t last, though, and we are once again in the sun, in a town, crossing a road and heading up another hill. We follow the road into the woods and onto some perfectly flat, perfectly wooded trail.

We somehow accidentally end up on an alternate that follows the Bon Nant river. It takes us to the same place as the main trail that runs through the town of Les Contamines, and while it’s kind of hilly at points, it is so calming to walk through the woods next to the flowing, perfectly clear glacial river.

We walk over a bridge and up a final hill to our stop for the night: La Ferme à Piron refuge. They must be expecting us because when we get there, the guy working the refuge instructs us to put our packs, poles, and shoes in a main coat room and to take whatever we need for the night in a little plastic tub. We reorganize and follow him upstairs, where we have our own private room at the top of the building! This is an unexpected treat. It’s a cute little room with a slanted roof. Grace takes the bed under the little nook formed by the slant and I take the other. She sends a photo later to her boyfriend, Nick, and he says it looks like “a convent for outdoorsy nuns.”

I want so badly just to fall asleep, but I have to rally myself to shower, which I eventually do, and then take a proper nap from which I wake up at exactly dinner time. It’s a small refuge and everyone has dinner in the kitchen at two communal tables. We squeeze in at the end with a family speaking French. The guy to my right asks me where I’m from (in English) and we start talking. He says he’s from Texas, though he has a French accent, and the woman, girl, and boy across the table are from Brittany, white the boy to his right (I say “boy” and “girl” but they’re probably teenagers), he says, is “a mix.” All of them speak French to each other but the guy on the far right, who I take to be the speaker’s son, sounds American when he speaks English. Fascinating. My brain starts working to piece together the family relation. They are going clockwise, the opposite direction as us, so they tell us that our next day is going to be tough since it’s all uphill.

Apart from a few pleasantries we don’t talk much, and the woman across from me doesn’t seem to speak English, so I feel a little awkward throughout dinner. I don’t remember how to do this hostel thing. It’s been a long time since my last Camino! What do people talk about at albergues? But dinner is excellent and simple: a pea and zucchini soup with cheese, a dal type dish with carrots and chickpeas served with rice, and for dessert a little creamy yogurt type dish with berries. Afterwards the refuge worker brings out a big bottle that he introduces as génépi, a homemade liquor traditional to this region that uses a plant that only grows in the alps. It’s a digestive so we sip slowly, and it’s pretty refreshing. I may have to pick some of that up before I head home…

Following dinner, Grace and I walk to the supermarket to pick up some treats for tomorrow since we’re camping. It is a gorgeous evening, golden hour with the light falling on the side of the mountains. In addition to a dinner for tomorrow night and cokes to pack out, we also get ice cream because why not have second dessert! We’re walking slowly down the street, talking about dogs, eating our ice cream beneath the mountains in France, and I am perfectly content.