Short summary -- downs and ups.
You know how you can tell that you've got a group of new hikers? You give them 8:30 as a departure time and you finally get underway around 9. Fortunately there was no reason to hurry today: 7.75 hours of hiking and fine weather. An added benefit: Beatrice (who isn't hiking) offered to take everything that was not needed for the next two days with her in her car (two days because we'll see her again two evenings from now at the Refuge de la Nova). You wouldn't believe the amount of stuff that suddenly was unnecessary -- the back of the car was full. Me, I wonder what they all have with them that they'll need the last two days but not the first two???
Eventually everyone was suncreamed up, provisioned, packed and repacked, hats adjusted and I don't know what else and we set off. The first part of the hike was a little dull -- a fairly steep descent of about 500m through woods down to a bridge over the Isère River. But the ascent on the other side was much more pleasant -- woods and fields, quaint Savoyard villages, beautiful views back to the high peaks of the Vanoise. It was warm though, and lunch shortly after midday in a dark shady spot was very welcome.
After lunch we were immediately confronted with a steep climb of about 100m up to the road leading into the village of Granier. Several people were leaning on their poles at the top (but no names will be divulged out of respect for their egos!). Then... disaster -- walking along the hot road one of Christophe's soles suddenly separated from the rest of his boot. I tried a quick repair with glue... which might perhaps have held if we had been able to leave it to set overnight, but under the circumstances it was at once clear that it was useless -- he would have to go back down into the valley to a larger town to find a sports store and buy new boots.
Père Ephrem quickly flagged down a passing car, Christophe was bundled in, and the rest of us continued on the hike. By now it was getting quite hot and Lidia started to flag <Lidia speaking: not true, I was hot, not flagging> <Guy speaking again: walking slower than before is flagging, regardless of the reason, IMHO, but what do I know?>. It is only her second day and, as has been mentioned, her "training" was quite limited. After one particularly slow stretch I doused her arms and head with a little cold water, which seemed to help some, but only temporarily.
Around 4PM we saw a taxi go by on a parallel road -- undoubtably Christophe. And whether by luck or design, it let him off a km up the road... where he decided to wait for us rather than walking back down in our direction. The thought occurred to more than one of us that things had worked out suspiciously well for him. Said suspicions were only strengthened when we heard about the beer he had enjoyed in Aime while waiting for the sports store to open.
I find climbs at the end of a long hike to be difficult... very difficult. Just when you are ready for a shower and some horizontal time, you have to exert yourself again. Well, the climb at the end of the day up to the refuge was... difficult. And for some more than others. At some point Lidia decided that she didn't feel like rushing up (her words) and sat down on a rock for twenty minutes to admire the view. Since, however, she had neglected to tell anyone why she was sitting on the rock, the rest of us became concerned and I dropped my pack and walked back down to see how she was. Fine, she said. Can I take your pack, I said. No, she said. It would be faster, I said. I don't want to be faster, she said. And so it went. So, I walked back on ahead... to find Christophe and Roxane kindly watching over my pack. And then I walked the final 20+ minutes to the refuge, to find the others waiting patiently for me to decided how they should divide themselves up between bunkrooms. Ah, the many and various tasks of the H3H organizer! So I told them to choose, which they did, and then 10 minutes later Lidia arrived and told them that they had chosen wrong. So some of them got moved.
Sigh.
Ups and downs.
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