Day 5 - Cabane de Louvie to Hérémence
We started off with a beautiful hike around the lake and up above it. There was quite a bit more vertical gain than we were expecting, followed by way more downhill as well, due to a last minute change for the night’s accomodation. We had snow at one of the passes, so that made it a bit more exciting (and cold!).
We started the early morning with some wonderful close encounters with the alpine ibex grazing near Cabane de Louvie.
We walked along the edge of the lake and it was always interesting to looks behind us and see how far we’d moved from the cabin.
As we got higher we got a quick glimpse of some of the mountain peaks as the coulds parted for a minute. You can also see the cabin far below behind the lake.
The hike had a lot of boulders to cross and some very steep inclines.
The views continued to amaze me as we got higher, and the sun was almost always behind the coulds, making for a moody day.
We ran into Sheila, Martin, and Charlie, fellow guests from Cabane de Louvie, and we would continue to see them until our last day of the hike! Sheila got this nice photo of us.
Every time I’d tell Grant that we’d seen the lake for the last time, we’d take a turn and it would come back into view. 😂 There were more chains along this route to help with the descent. I was so grateful it wasn’t raining, because there were definitely some steep parts of the trail!
This is a bad picture, but we saw marmots along the top of this hike.
We were grateful to make it to the top, and it was pretty cold, so we had to find a place protected from the wind to eat lunch.
I was always excited to see the next sign, and this was just the first of the summits for the day.
Once we crossed over, we saw the basin that we had to descend into and then climb up and out the other side.
There were a lot of little glacier filled lakes here.
These were the markers that we followed throughout the entire trip. This was the biggest one we saw on the hike.
As we were getting closer to the top (but still waaaaay farther than we realized), the clouds started to roll in more thickly.
We took one last look behind us and forged on to the summit.
As we climbed a boulder field through thick clouds, it started to snow. The visibility was very low, and it was getting pretty cold, but we followed the signs as best we could and finally reached the summit!
Here you can kind of see the snow as we started to climb down.
We heard that we may get some snow, so I was kind of excited, despite the cold and slippery trail.
After a while of clibing down we reached the place where we had originally planned to stay, Cabane de Prafleuri. By this time it was still raining and I was starting to get tired and hungry, and we were both low on food. From here we had to hike down along the Dixence River. Fortunately it was beautiful and it eventually stopped raining.
We saw a big ibex that looked to be tagged near the bottom of the river.
We also came across a cute baby ibex with (what I’m assuming is) it’s mother. ❤️
We had to go back up after we made it to the bottom, but we finally arrived to the dam!
As we were climbing down we came across some ibex that were acting more territorial and critical of us than all the others we had encountered.
They were all watching us closely as we neared them.
I was nervous to pass in the middle of them, but Grant went ahead.
Once we got past them we saw that on the left side there was a group of baby ibex, so it made sense that they were being protective. ❤️
We finally made it to the dam, and we were able to take the gondola (see the photo below) down to save our knees from a few more feet of elevation loss.
We got to our hotel, “Le Ritz.”
But I’d say it’s very different from what I think of when I hear Ritz. 😂
