We had a nice campsite near a creek. The tree overhead obscured our view of the glacier, but that’s one thing I never understood. Whenever I’m in my tent, I’m basically sleeping or going to sleep and never admiring the views outside. So I never understood people’s obsession with giving their tent a good view. I’ve also had the experience that the best views usually come with the worst conditions (wind). Anyway I slept great but apparently someone showed up at 11:30 and shined their headlamp everywhere, according to Zoë.
We left at 7:00 and the trail was quiet. We went up and over a ridge into the next valley, which was the town of Les Contamines. It was still early so it was relatively quiet. On the way out of town, we started seeing people. And then we started seeing tons of people. It was our “Everest base camp” day. Everyone was on this trail. It was nuts. We were on the main TMB trail with the normal itinerary folks. It was insane the difference both the time of day and official trail makes. I took it for granted because we spent most of our time on scenic variants.
We climbed for ages through a sea of people. Most of the time we could eventually pass them but sometimes you had to just settle into the conga line and wait. Zoë had told me to prepare for an 8-9 hour day so when we reached the top of the pass a little after 4 hours, I assumed we were only halfway done with the day. We had lunch at the top, with tons of other people.
I guess it wasn’t the top because after lunch we kept climbing. It was harder to climb with a full stomach and partially fatigued legs. I had to rely a bit on Zoë for water as I ran out when not all of our streams materialized. However one did, before the trail split off.
The trail split off at another peak, this time with a variant we would take. We left probably 95% of people behind at that junction. Unfortunately for us, more climbing. Even when we reached the next pass, there was an option Zoë proposed that had us climb up to a view point for another 20 minutes. Since we weren’t dead, we decided to do it. The views really weren’t much better than at the pass itself but it did let us look down the entire way we had come up, which was cool.
We descended back to the pass and finally started our descending part of the day. There was one tour group going this way and I managed to pass all 15 of them at once on the decent. We overheard one of the tour group members arguing with the French guide about something. The French guide did not seem thrilled and wasn’t giving any concessions in the discussion. I bet she figured she wasn’t getting paid enough.
As an aside, to get paragliding certified in the U.S., it’s around $3500, whereas you can do the French equivalent for €800. The French equivalent doesn’t require as many hours I don’t think, but what a difference in price. I think we talked about that briefly today.
We were planning to camp somewhere along the trail today and although we still had energy, we started looking for spots on the descent. It didn’t look great and the best ones, in hindsight, ended up being much higher up. We got down to a road, where a shuttle arrived just as we got there. We contemplated taking it, as it went to a campground, but we couldn’t really reach a decision so we skipped it and decided to walk on. About 15 minutes down the road, we decided to turn around and take the next shuttle to a guaranteed camping spot, rather than walk another 90 minutes and hope to find something.
The shuttle took us, ironically, back to where the main TMB itinerary finishes its day 2. So there are tons of other people here, probably on their second day of the TMB. I chuckled when I saw some girls stretching at the end of their day. I remember when we aspired to do that. Tomorrow, we’ll aim to take the first shuttle back and resume our hike, assuming it isn’t full.