FRANCE-ITALY-SWITZ Tour du Mont Blanc 2007

Tour du Mont Blanc (Mach 2)   3-11 June, 2007.

My husband did not seem impressed by my suggestion to repeat TMB: “Not the Tour du Mont Blanc again! Can’t we do something different?”

“But I LOVE the Tour, and it won’t be the same. I’ll take you via a different route, and we’ll stay in different huts, and it’s one month earlier, so the snow will be different and the flowers will be totally different.” How do you resist such a wife? He ceded to the torrent. I began my plans.

I kept to my word, and nature kept to hers. The snow made everything totally different, and, as I knew would be the case, the flowers were, of course, not the flowers of mid summer, but the early bulbs that come out just after the snow has melted: crocuses (mauve and white), trolle d’europa, a few stray narcissus poeticas, gentians, early orchids (mainly Dactylorhiza sambucina), violas, an assortment of ranunculus and pulsatellas, aconite, veronica, the darling delicate soldanella alpina, and many more.

 Because we were so early in the season, the huts of the high mountains were closed (although some had a winter room open that one could bivvy in), so a down side was that we slept in the valleys, but the adventure of doing it in the snow more than compensated. I think the photos speak for themselves with regard to the beauty we found there.

My husband loved it, and I did not cry at the end of this one, as I knew I’d convinced him that it doesn’t matter how many times you do something beautiful; there will always be new variations, and new things to discover. I knew we’d be back; it was just a matter of when.

We took a day longer this time (eight), but still had days in reserve for emergencies, as usual. So what do you do with your spare days? We love this route so much that we just continued walking, using the spare days in yet another variation of the route, going even higher this time, and catching public transport back to Chamonix when our time was up.

Day 9 en route to lac blanc