We got up bright and early and drove up to La Gaubie, 1550m, for a walk up through the Aygues Cluses valley to the Col de Madamete at 2509m and then over an other Col at around 2550m back down the valley past Lac Noir around 8-9 miles walk (that is taken from Google).
I have never walked that high before. My previous record was 2000m in Andorra, with a little cheating as I started at 1800 or so metres.
It was well beautiful, sunny, hot and went up and up.
Just before we took off I went to “see a man about a dog” and had such a good “talk” that I didn’t had to go again until we were back at base camp 9 hours later 🙂 I managed to drink around 10 litres of water in that time and most of the time walking up it would have been as much use to have poured it on my body as I was sweating so much. It was pretty much running straight through me. Peli told me that I was looking like I had lost a stone in weight and a bit knackered too and I WAS knackered!
Peli tells me that she saw a marmotte legging it when a dog got a whiff of it, but all I managed was to hear was its call, pretty much like a bird/high pitched whistle. Other locals we managed to see included some sheep, cows, ponies and a million and a half insects in form of flies and biting things, they got me 3 times, biting bastards …
We saw lots of flowers such as thrift, yellow and blue gentians, harebells etc. When we got back to the car Peli’s mum told us that she could taste in the water from up the mountain a slight hint of raspberry, which we didn’t taste but there were some wild raspberry plants nearby where we picked up some water.
Sight of the day was of course the mountains, but as we were descending we saw a small plane and a parapente flying around in the valley below us like birds, that just made you feel so small and realise how big these lumps of rocks are.
8-9 miles walk in very rocky terrain for 9 hours and altitude gain (and drop) of over 1000m, I could see it in my fingers when we were coming down the mountain as they just bloated up.
All in all a great day out with a brilliant guide, Peli’s dad.
Oh I forgot I even got to make a snow man 🙂
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