Our plan was to travel in September to avoid the peak summer crowds. Our hope was to get better weather in the French Alps than we would in Switzerland or Austria at that time. We had good weather in September 2018 on a trip to the Italian Dolomites. Our previous experiences in the Alps were back in the 1970s as students!
We flew direct from San Francisco to Zurich, Switzerland, and then on to Milan, Italy. This was our cheapest option with good flight times. After staying overnight at a hotel by the airport to get used to the time zone change, we rented a car the next day and drove west on the autostrada about 3 hours to end up in the central French Alps at the city of Briancon.
We followed our usual travel routine of reserving accommodations in advance for only the beginning and end of the trip. We would find accommodations as we went during the middle part, using the WiFi at our current location to find the next one. We booked only apartments with kitchens, half through Airbnb and half through Booking.com. Our average cost was about $100 per night.
Karen is a creative cook and enjoys going to the local supermarkets and buying their local meats, produce, breads (and pasta in Italy), dairy, etc., to prepare our own food. So even with a roof over our heads, we are still "camping". Food prices in the big supermarkets seemed similar to what we have here in California, and local fruits and vegetables were excellent.
September was definitely off-season in the central French Alps. No crowds anywhere. Roads and trails mostly empty. Plenty of last-minute accommodations available in the towns. Most mountain refuges closed on September 15.
Our goal with trips like this to distant places is to see and experience the natural areas in the context of the local culture. The natural attractions of the Alps to me are high mountains - many with jagged peaks - with glaciers and permanent snowfields, green sweeping meadows, and deep glacial valleys. Unfortunately for casual hiking, the deep valleys are generally inhabited with towns and roads and the trails head straight up the mountains! It took some study to find easier trails that either visit the undeveloped headwater remnants of those deep valleys or start from road passes.
The cultural context was to see how millennia of human occupation have penetrated throughout the mountains, in contrast to our High Sierra, which is mostly still wild. We admired the compact and neat villages, often with quaint architecture, that dot the mountain valleys. These Alps are highly accessible, with well-maintained roads that penetrate all valleys and cross the high passes that would have only trails in the Sierra. There is also a dense network of marked trails, many of which are actually farm or forestry minor roads closed to public vehicle travel. This accessibility was good for sightseeing and casual hiking, but the lack of wildness made the scenery less inspiring to me.
One thing we really noticed is how even the highest meadows are used for livestock grazing. Very high valleys would have summer farms (probably year-round in earlier times) with portable milking stations managing small groups of dairy cows and accessed by rough dirt roads doubling as hiking trails. Again, cows (and sheep some places) everywhere - even in protected "nature reserves" with signs prohibiting everything else - detracted from the hiking experience for me.
The other cultural context that seems ubiquitous in the Alps is ski area development. We would see numerous lifts and ski slopes from the roads, but found some wild hiking trails devoid of these mechanical intrusions. Overall, I would say that the mountains themselves were often spectacular, but never actually wild.
I'm old school - I did not use internet sites to scope out potential hiking areas, but instead I used a few English-language books I bought on Amazon: "Walking in the Brianconnais" from Cicerone Press (UK); "Wild Guide French Alps" from Wild Things Publishing (UK); and "The Green Guide French Alps" from Michelin. I also bought the Michelin regional maps for the French Alps, which was helpful to locate places described in the books while studying them before the trip. I printed off topo maps of likely hiking areas from Caltopo.com, using the OpenStreetMap base layer with Contours overlay and MapBuilder overlay. Google maps was used for driving directions, using a SIM card and data plan I purchased from a European phone company.
We spent the first four days in Briancon, which is central to many good hikes. Unfortunately, I caught an intestinal bug of some kind on the first day. I was pretty sick with diarrhea the first few days and not totally well until the end of the trip. So the first three days we just did some auto-touring, explored the old walled city of Briancon and did easy local hikes. Too bad, because those were some of the better weather days. Our last day in Briancon had perfect weather - totally blue sky and high about 70F. I was feeling better, so we did our longest hike - about 12 miles round trip into a wild valley in the northeast end of the Ecrins park. But I was wiped out by the end.
We then moved over to a small town on the western side of the Ecrins park and did a couple of days of sightseeing and short hikes in the big glacial Valgaudemar and Veneon valleys heading back to the high peaks. The weather started to deteriorate - cold with lots of clouds, including some obscuring high peaks, but no rain. This was our general weather for the rest of the trip, with some sun but always cool and mostly cloudy.
I was checking weather forecasts on weatherunderground.com and accuweather.com. It looked like all of the Alps were getting this same general cloudiness and some storms, but as I expected, colder up in the Swiss Alps. We considered heading south into the lower Maritime Alps, but the forecast wasn't really much better there, so instead we headed north to see more of the bigger mountains, this time, around the edges of the Vanois National Park.
It was a long round-about trip from the southwestern side of Ecrins park, west down to the city of Grenoble, and then northeast back up into the mountains on the south side of the Vanois park. We stayed in a tiny apartment in a small village with narrow streets that was part of Val Cenis. Along the way, we stopped to see a 19th century fort complex perched on a high bluff above a deep river gorge. That's another big difference from the Sierra - the Alps have seen wars for centuries and have both the forts and the scars from that. We did a couple of short hikes from Val Cenis under completely cloudy skies that threatened rain. But we did see some higher peaks to the east covered with fresh snow!
For our final days in France, we moved to the north side of the Vanois massif. We drove over the Col de L'Iseran pass, one of the highest road passes in France, on a narrow road with steep dropoffs and no guard rails - that was an adventure itself. On the north side, we had glimpses of glacier covered peaks under lowering clouds and stopped to do a short hike up a side valley before stopping in the town of Bourg-St-Maurice.
The next day started with clear skies. My goal was to do an ambitious hike from the town of Pralognan on the west side of the Vanois park up to the Col de la Vanoise in the center of the park's high peaks. From the town, the hike is about 5 miles one way but over 4,000 feet elevation gain. That's a lot for us old folks, especially in unsettled weather! A sightseeing gondola to a peak east of town can cut the elevation gain to less than 2000 feet. But it wasn't running this late in the season! So we hiked up a side valley to the south from the village of Les Prioux and part way up a mountain there instead. That ended up being a good choice because the higher peaks to the east totally clouded over, while our hike stayed in the sun.
This was the end of our hiking in France. The next day, we drove over another high pass and down to the Italian town of Courmayeur below Mont Blanc, which we never saw because clouds covered the upper half. We did a nice hike that would normally have good views of Mont Blanc, but settled for views of the valley below. On our final day, we drove back to Milan in pouring rain the whole way. As always, I was glad to return to sunny California and our wild High Sierra!
-Phil
I only brought my old iPhone to take photos and just took snapshots. Here are a few of the better mountain pictures.
Northeast side of Ecrins National Park:
I was feeling a bit better on the third day, and the weather was pretty good with only a few clouds and not too cold, so we drove just north of Briancon on a paved road up to Col du Granon and took a short hike of about 4 miles round trip with 1000 feet total elevation gain on the ridge to the north, which gave us this view to the west of some of the highest peaks in the Ecrins National Park.
- View west to Ecrins Peaks from Col du Granon
- La Meije peak
- Head of main branch of Upper Remarche Valley
- Western branch of upper Remarche Valley
- Trail in upper Remarche Valley cuts across this steep slope
After a long drive around to the west side of the Ecrins National Park, we explored two major valleys. We drove up the Valgaudemar Valley, stopping to admire big waterfalls on the side slopes, to the end of the road where the valley branches both left and right to cirques under the high peaks. We took a short round-trip walk of about 4 miles and 700 feet elevation gain on the trail up the southern branch. We had some sun, but lots of clouds over the higher peaks.
- Valley south of Gioberney in Valgaudemar Valley
- Valley south of La Berarde in Veneon Valley
South side of Vanois National Park
A long day of driving out of the mountains to Grenoble and back up took us to Val Cenis in the L'Arc River valley. We had time in the afternoon to walk from our cute little village up a dirt road on the slopes to the south and found this attractive farm pasture.
- Farm pasture in middle elevation of L'Arc River valley
- Fresh snow on peaks at head of L'Arc River
West side of Vanois National Park
The next day we moved over to Bourg-St-Maurice by driving over the high Col De L'Iseran from the head of the L'Arc River valley and then down the Isere River valley past numerous ski areas. On the way, we did a short hike on a dirt farm road of about 4 miles and 600 feet elevation gain up a broad meadowy valley in the Reserve naturelle nationale de La Grande Sassiere, again under cloudy skies.
The next day dawned mostly clear and we drove around to the west side of the Vanois National Park to the town of Pralognan. Finding that the gondola ride we needed to make a reasonable hike to Col de la Vanoise was closed for the season, we drove up the big valley to the south past the village of Les Prioux to the parking lot at the end of the public access. We walked up the continuing dirt road that services summer farms.
- Valley above Les Prioux
- View north from trail on side of Petit Mont Blanc
- High peaks east of Pralognan
