August 1, 2024

Auberge Mont Blanc in Trient to Auberge la Boerne in Tré-le-Champ 

8.6 miles 

I’m impressed with Auberge Mont Blanc. It’s enormous, but they still manage to provide hikers with everything they need. Enough showers with hot water and good water pressure? Check. Friendly employees and a nice bar? Check. A buffet breakfast with endless bread and yogurt and the most enormous tub of Nutella I’ve ever seen? Check. We’re the last to leave our room and one of the last to leave the refuge, but one must enjoy the amenities while one can. 

The talk this morning is of the impending rain. Depending on what weather app you’re using, there is between 10% and 100% chance of rain today, with thunderstorms later. It looks clear for now, but who knows. These are the mountains. We’ve been lucky with the weather so far, even avoiding the worst of the downpour yesterday, so it’s about time for us to get wet, I suppose. 

The first part of the trail is flat and follows the road to the campground in Le Peuty that we walked by last night. Quickly after this it starts rising gently along a gravel road. The Trient glacier is visible to the left in the morning light, illuminated in a God ray like in some oil painting. Absurd. Absurd, the beauty of this trail. 

Once the TMB enters the woods, shit gets real. It’s steep, rocky, and extremely crowded. We pass one group after another and somehow there are still groups of people climbing. It doesn’t feel like we’re zooming at all; we fall into a nice cadence on the surprisingly lovely switchbacks and simply don’t want to stop, both because we don’t want to lose our rhythm and because it means we will have to pass the same people again, which, kill me. 

The trees end, the world opens up, and we can see the Refuge du Col de Balme atop the saddle in the distance. There’s thunder; it’s cloudier now. Across the valley there are some very stormy looking clouds rolling in. We pass people putting their rain gear on, including Jeanne and George, but I’m not convinced yet that it’s going to chuck it down, so we keep going upwards. 

Sure enough, it holds out until we get to the refuge. As it starts raining more, the horde of people there enters en masse to the tiny space. I think this is the one thing I hate about the Tour du Mont Blanc: the crowds. I knew it was going to be crowded because this is the best season, and because it’s pretty accessible with the network of public transit and luggage transfer services, and yes, I’m happy that people are out here experiencing nature, but it’s still infuriating in the moment when we have to fight through the crowd just to put our packs in the storage room and edge towards the bar. 

We order cappuccinos and hazelnut cake and manage to find a free table with two seats next to the nice Dutch couple we’ve been hiking around for the last few days. They’re taking a gondola down to the valley since the woman—I keep forgetting to ask their names—is having some knee pain. They ask where we’re staying tonight, and we say that we’re camping at Auberge La Boerne.

“Camping?” the woman asks, aghast. “Tonight? With the rain?”

This makes me concerned, since I was under the impression that it was not supposed to rain tonight. But again. Who knows. It’s the mountains. Things change quickly. 

We keep an eye on the weather and it looks to be fairly clear, so after a few rounds of Uno, we decide to head out. Getting rained on is part of hiking, right? 

It’s actually very sunny and nice by the time we get going, and fairly quickly I have to stop and take my jacket off. 

We pass a family looking through binoculars at the hill up towards our right. 

“Do you see something?” Grace asks. 

“There was a marmot, but it went under the ground.” 

Bummer! Missed another marmot sighting opportunity. But some other creatures appear shortly: some kind of moth that looks oddly like a hummingbird, and then a giant bird that looks like an eagle or falcon. 

At the bottom of the first descent there is a herd of cows with the cute Swiss style bells (even though we have returned to France). I don’t know why these cows with their bells are so fascinating, but they are.

Unhappily, the trail goes uphill after this. It’s not a pleasant uphill. It gets really rocky and I feel spent from the earlier climb that we took at a determined pace. But the views, of course, are worth it. There is an enormous glacier to the left, a rocky peak straight ahead. At the top of the climb we take a short break for a snack, but it’s extremely windy and I’m immediately cold so we don’t stay for long. 

The descent begins and the sun is suddenly brutal. Maybe it’s because I haven’t had much water today, or because this terrain is similar to the place where I sprained my ankle on the AT, or because I burnt myself out on the earlier ascent, or some combination of factors, but it for whatever reason I start crashing hard as we come down. It’s so rocky and steep and every step hurts. There are blueberries, so that’s nice, and obviously there are the views of the glaciers. But I’m still bonking. 

It gets a little better when we reenter the trees. It’s lovely and pine-y and the ground is softer. We accidentally make a wrong turn and have to backtrack, but this wrong way has wild strawberries so that’s a little gift. Once we right our path and meet the final junction, it’s like Grace and I suddenly, at the same time, have nothing left in the tank and sit down on a rock. I fall asleep. We stay there half-comatose for at least half an hour.

The two American girls from dinner last night and Diego from Peru, who keeps popping up everywhere, pass us and ask if we’re okay. 

“Do you need a snack?” one of the girls asks. 

“No, we’re ok, we just kind of crashed,” I reply. “Thank you, though.”

Eventually we work up the energy to finish the last half mile to Auberge La Boerne. 

This place is cute and has a lot of character. One of the FarOut comments likened it to a hobbit house, which I can totally see. It appears to be some kind of renovated barn. All the beams are slightly wonky and the ceiling is low. 

We check in for camping and the woman working the counter gives us the details: €35 gets us dinner, breakfast, access to the showers and wifi, and the camping. A good deal, I think. But for reasons I can’t figure out, we can’t set up our tents until after dinner at 8:30. We’re allowed to stake out a spot, but not to put up the tent. 

So we walk over to the camping yard and drop our things. It’s looking like it might rain again though, so I don’t fully unpack. Grace agrees to watch our stuff while I take a shower, then we’ll switch. When I come back out, it has started to drizzle, and by the time I get over to Grace sitting in the yard next to our stuff, which she’s covered with her tent, it’s full on storming. Then hailing. We make a mad dash back into the refuge as we chaotically grab all our gear. So much for those dry shorts. 

No one really seems to mind us bringing our packs inside, so we sit for hours in the cozy little hobbit hole of a refuge. I order a beer and a “salty pie,” which really looks like a quiche, and consume both while I tap away on my keyboard writing. There’s an extremely cute dog who keeps me company while I do this, hoping for a little snack.

Eventually the weather abates, the first dinner time—not our dinner time—rolls around, and we are exiled back outside. Even though we’re not technically supposed to set up now until 8, I pitch my tent anyway just after 7 so it can air out and I can get my stuff inside in case it rains again. To my horror, I notice slugs surrounding the tent area. Thick, shiny, black slugs. Oh God. Not again. I have major slug trauma from Minnesota. But what’s a girl to do? I must accept the sluggage. 

We get called to dinner early; we’re assigned to sit at the outside tables since it’s cleared up. For the third time, we’re sitting with four French speaking people who talk exclusively to each other in French the entire time, even though we give them what I think is a friendly hello when we sit down. It’s awkward, but at least we’re outside and not in that tiny building and there are things to look at—like the cat climbing on the roof of the refuge! 

It’s actually pretty nice to cozy up in my tent. I think I prefer this to sleeping inside the refuges. It’s like my own little pod, there’s no one I don’t know uncomfortably close to me, and though this tent is kind of dank and smells bad from all the damp hiking I’ve been doing this summer, it’s my own private safe space. 

And it does feel quite safe, even when another dramatic thunderstorm rolls through in the middle of the night. We’re talking thunder and lightning, pelting rain, possibly even hail again at one point. The Duplex withstands it all. I just cuddle into my sleeping bag and trust my gear and my pitching skills. The storm eventually abates, and I drift right back to sleep in my little Dyneema home.