Short summary -- adieu les Alpes de Sud.
I Re Magi, the refuge we stayed at last night, is a nice place. Deck chairs to lounge in the sun after you arrive, aperitifs on the house a few minutes before dinner, plenty of reasonably inventive food, free WiFi, friendly and humourous staff... now, if only they could solve the banana bed problem! The past couple of nights I've had the misfortune of having to sleep on beds that sag... or perhaps I should say, having to try to sleep on such beds. I hope I'll have more luck in Modane.
Another beautiful day -- not a cloud in the sky. We got underway around 9AM and hiked up to the 2450m pass through lovely woods and meadows surrounded by impressive mountains. There were a fair number of other hikers and walkers around -- Nevache and the Clarée Valley have become much more popular in the last five years, and so there are a lot of French people on day hikes, ditto for Italians who can drive up from Bardonecchia, and lastly the GR5, the primary north/south long-distance hike through the French Alps, also goes over the pass, so there are a lot of long distance hikers too. Not to say that it felt crowded, but just that there were more people around than has been typical for most of the H3H so far.
We got to the pass around midday, and saw the massive bulk of the Vanoise peaks ahead of us across the Modane valley... we'll be going up through them in a couple of days. It won't be easy, because we'll have to climb almost 1800m up from Modane to the first, and highest, pass....
But for today all we had to do was walk down the long and, for the most part, gentle descent down to Modane... which we did, arriving around 4PM. An easy day, except perhaps for Ioana, who has been battling a cold and lost her voice sometime during the hike. Hope she recovers sufficient strength during tomorrow's rest day.
And with today's hike, we are finished with the southern French Alps. This is of interest and importance because the weather patterns in the northern and the southern French Alps are often quite different: the southern Alps being more influenced by Mediterranean weather patterns, and the northern Alps having weather more typical of Switzerland. Since the weather has been hot and dry in the south, and wet and cool in the north, we might see less perfect weather than we have had so far... :-(.
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