SnowSlider – Blogging From the mountains by ise

Just a handful of quick shots from the Vanoise National Park in the French Alps over the last few days. It’s end of season really so a bit of snow isn’t unusual, these are taken walking from the refuge at the Col de Vanoise descending to the Pralognan.

And I’ve walked past this via ferrata before, I’d thought about bringing some gear and doing it when I’d finished the hut-to-hut trip but it looks busy so I think the quick ascent I’d thought of wouldn’t have worked out.

I reckon Dent de Broc is about the closest peak to the house, it’s certainly the closest to the house that I’d not been up before. Although it’s a fairly modest height it’s a slightly daunting proposition as there’s no major path up it and it’s unrelentingly steep. It was already 30′C at the bottom so it promised to be a long, hot climb.

And it didn’t disappoint, the path starts off just heading straight up the hill for the first 45 minutes or so before relenting and dropping into an easier set of switchbacks through the forest before breaking out onto the high meadows. I’d heard voices as I was going up calling out so I wasn’t surprised to meet some people moving some cows between different meadows. There’s no track up here so they’d walked up the same way I did, not just the people but most probably the cows as well.

On reaching the col, a 100m below the summit, you get some views across the local area and you see this familiar “U” shaped feature on a lot of the summits that’s so distinctive of the peaks around here.

For variety I decided to descend the other side of the actual summit to join a path to the town of Broc (above) which sits at the side of Lac Gruyére. I’d stopped to sit on an old log in the shade to eat my lunch and found this frog had beat me to the shady spot. He stuck around long enough for a photo’ before moving on though.

I also ticked the geocache GCP9VD while I was passing, as this requires a significant walk I was only the second person this year to go there and one of only 17 since 2005 when it was placed. Something of a contrast from some of the ones near car parks that get half a dozen visits every weekend. In fact, I’d taken the even harder approach by going up and over the Dent de Broc. This cache gets a terrain rating of 4/5 for the difficulty of the approach, I’m thinking of not doing any that are easier than 3/5 in future.