Short summary -- exhilaration instead of disaster.
Earplugs!! I love them and hug them and squeeze them and call them George.... In other words, I slept well. We were all in a single bunkroom just off the shower room (except for Père Ephrem, because I had booked for him later) and it wasn't conducive to a good night's rest unless you had earplugs. Dinner had been excellent, by the way... but the bunkroom causes the Nova's overall rating to slip.
At dinner we had discussed what to do with the next day's hike. The dilemma was that there were two options: one shorter, and a second much longer and more difficult. Having seen how Lidia and Christophe and Roxane had done with the previous day's hike, it was pretty clear that they should take the shorter option. Père Ephrem, Sofia, and Arnulf were all experienced enough to handle the difficulty and in good enough shape to keep the day from getting too long. The tricky decision was Ioana. I felt that she would be able to handle the difficulty, but her stamina and fitness, as has been mentioned in earlier blog posts, are not back to where they used to be, and I felt that she would need much longer than the rest of us... and it was already going to be a long day. To her credit, she took the decision well, although I'm sure it must have irked her given her love for the mountains. So we split into two groups of four each.
My group set off around 8AM. The first part of the hike was about an hour and a half up a road... generally not my favorite thing to do, but in this case with very little traffic and beautiful views. And then, as Sofia put it, the good life ended. We began to climb steeply towards the Refuge Robert Blanc -- very steeply. We had about 700m of ascent to do, and after we had done about half I called a halt and we sat for a few minutes to recover. The second half was worse. Whereas the first half was a trail, albeit steep, the second half was rather a combination of suggestions and confirmations.
We were going up an area of rock that had probably been under a glacier not too long ago and was worn smooth in places, scored in others. and steep most of the time... difficult to walk up, and even more so when you are looking around for badly worn trail markers and cairns. By the time we reached the refuge (around midday) the other three were near exhaustion... at any rate, their postures strongly suggested this (for example, Père Ephrem had his head in his hands lying on the lunch table, Arnulf was lying down on a bench), as did their lack of desire to order lunch (I mean, hello? Midday = lunch, people! :-).
However, an hour later, after some good omelettes (with Beaufort cheese and sausage), a fresh salad, bread, hot chocolate, coffee, and a few liters of mineral water had done their usual magic, they were ready to go on. We had a difficult traverse ahead of us to the Col de Seigne -- the border with Italy -- which didn't look very far on the map, but according to the signpost would take us three hours... in other words the implication was that it would be very difficult. And so it was.
Very steep ascents and descents, lots of scree, lots of glacier-polished rock, tumbling streams to cross, a twisting and turning trail, cables, pitons to step on, a single beam bridge... challenging! A very good thing actually that we went up that pass next to the Pierra Menta yesterday, because as a result it was clear who should and shouldn't come on the difficult hike today. Without that experience yesterday, and not knowing how difficult the trail would turn out to be, it could easily have happened that we all (or almost all) would have taken the difficult hike... with disastrous results. Either people would have had had to turn around (but the way back to the Robert Blanc hut, the descent from it, and then the rest of the standard way over the Col de Seigne would have taken an age), or we would all have soldiered on and it would have taken until evening (at least).
And I haven't yet mentioned the final barrier: we came around a corner after over two hours to see a black wall ahead of us that must have been 80m high, and a faint zig-zag trail visible climbing up it. Urk. And almost simultaneously we heard then saw a rescue helicopter fly into the ravine between us and the black wall. It hover landed (one side on the ground, the other in the air, the rotors turning) and someone was helped/carried in from a group on the ground. After a quick stop in a flatter area downslope (probably to stabilize the person injured), the helicopter flew off. A short time later as we were going down to the ravine we saw a lot of blood on the trail -- perhaps a falling stone had hit someone on the head? A sobering reminder of how quickly things can go wrong in the high mountains.
And we still had the wall to climb. Fortunately it was well-secured with cables, but by the time we got to the top we were ready for the day to end. But it didn't, of course: we still had over 500m to go down to our refuge for the night -- Elisabetta Soldini.
Phew! A lot of fun, but I'm glad we don't have to do hikes like that every day.
PS The other group reported that they had an exceptionally nice day -- quite relaxed and unpressured: they arrived around 3:30, and we, surprisingly, only about an hour and a quarter later at 4:45PM.
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