Mont Thabor – day 15
27.7.2023 Thursday
Valfrejús – Les Grands Lacs
→ 22,47 km ↑ 2016 m ↓ 1046 m
The morning is not good. I drank too much Prosecco and got too little sleep. Honestly, I didn’t even want that Prosecco yesterday. When Jozef first asked if I wanted some, I said probably not. But he asked again, and since there was a shop right there and we’d walked so far already, he went and bought it — thirty centiliters of Prosecco won’t kill me, right. Except it was drier one and Jozef didn’t really like it. He had one glass with me and then switched to the beer he’d been carrying up from below, saying he’d help me finish it later (in the end he just took a sip from my glass). I liked it, I go for the drier Prosecco and it tastes great after forty kilometers, but it was completely the wrong call. When we’re walking this much, I need to actually sleep at night so my body can rest and recover — not to give it more work by having to process alcohol on top of everything. And there’s a difference between half a liter of beer for Jozef and half a liter of Prosecco for me. Especially when you only get ten hours of downtime (meaning, not walking). On a shorter day, when we finish by 5pm and have a drink then, the body can process it before sleep and you usually get more rest anyway. In the morning I can still walk fine, the body’s gotten used to that part, but the fatigue catches up eventually. Last year on the TMB we drank a lot more often. It was a bit of a vicious circle — we’d be completely exhausted, so we’d have some wine, and then the next day I’d almost always end up napping in the afternoon because I just couldn’t function. And back then we weren’t even doing distances and elevations like we are here. Today is a genuinely beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky, pleasant temperature, no storms in the forecast. Completely perfect, and the only thing on my mind is why on earth I drank so much yesterday, and why I drank at all. Instead of soaking in the scenery, my head just keeps circling around this and it’s all mushy in there. It’s dangerous, too — if something happened today, some kind of emergency, you’re just not fully there, and that’s when mistakes happen. Naturally, first thing this morning I snapped at Jozef about why he even bought the Prosecco in the first place, since I hadn’t wanted it and then he barely drank it either. And then I got annoyed at myself for not just saying a firm no, and for finishing it anyway. So the mood was pretty sour. We got up at 6:45am and went into town for breakfast, to the charging point, since there was water there too — we just packed up the tent and headed there. I also did some laundry in the bathroom. We spent a long time there, needed to charge the power bank. We set off at 9am and I feel awful. Not physically — mentally. I’d rather just lie down somewhere and have a cry. My legs keep walking, sometimes I say something to Jozef, and slowly my thoughts start sorting out.
After an hour, we stop for a peach, I snuggle a bit, but I still feel like crying over this whole wrong decision of mine. We push on, telling ourselves we can have lunch in an hour and I can lie down for a bit. It cheers me up when we spot a marmot. The world is right again. Jozef read up on them yesterday, so he tells me all sorts of interesting facts. The old Slovak word for them is “hvizdoš” (whistler). A lot of the young ones die over winter because they don’t eat enough during summer and don’t build up sufficient reserves until spring. And their population is declining because they only mate for a few hours a year, in April, once the snow melts and the first high-pressure system rolls in — meaning good weather. But that’s exactly when a lot of people show up in the mountains too, disturbing them, so there end up being fewer baby marmots. We sit down in a meadow with a nice view and Jozef gets the baguettes ready.
I write. I need to get it out of my system so I can move on. Because we’ve still got big things planned for today, and I don’t want to worry about things I can’t change. I rest for a bit longer and then I feel fine. So the lesson here is: when you don’t want something, just say no. And when you don’t know whether you want it or not, the answer is also no (that one’s from Naval Ravikant’s Almanack, highly recommend it). The next 5 km is a pleasant climb up to Lac du Peyron, where some guy is fishing. Who knows what you can actually catch at 2500 meters above sea level.
After that the trail gets tougher, both in elevation gain and terrain. At the Col des Méandes pass (2718 m), we stop to eat before the hard climb, and I even squeeze in a nap. Ahead of us: 450 meters of elevation gain over 2 km. We climb slowly, the landscape shifting into a desert-like terrain with patches of snow.
At 3:30pm we reached the summit of Mont Thabor, at 3178 m. It’s actually the only proper peak we climbed on our whole route, and also the highest point of the trip. For me, it’s also a new personal altitude record.
And then there are the views! We can see all of Vanoise and the Écrins park. We got absolutely perfect weather for it, with excellent visibility.
We stay up there a long time, taking lots of photos. I hand my phone to a French lady and ask her to take our picture, giving her a few pointers so it comes out well.
Then we take photos of her whole family. To our surprise, all four of them speak fluent, lovely English. We hang around a while longer, watching an elderly gentleman — we nicknamed him “uncle” — walk to every edge of the summit and stand there for a moment, then come back and do it again. Eventually he comes over to Jozef, and it turns out he’s actually looking for his glasses. Sadly, we hadn’t seen any, so we start heading down.
The descent to the Col de la Chapelle pass (2937 m) is still fairly fine. “Uncle” overtakes us, cutting straight down diagonally from the top — he clearly knows the area and comes here often. From the pass, two paths lead onward: one along the right side of the valley, the other along the left. We take the right one. We’re not entirely sure where we’re going, there’s a lot of rock and scree, so we navigate by cairns. We let “uncle” go ahead of us, figuring he’ll know the way. We follow him for a bit, but then he veers off the path and cuts straight down through a snowfield. We stick to the trail. “Now that’s a mess,” Jozef comments on the descent through the rockslide, where there’s no real path — every step you take, you sink in and drag a chunk of rocks down with you.
At one point he even declares he’d actually welcome hiking boots for terrain like this. Every now and then we look around to see if we can still spot “uncle,” but he’s vanished. We take another break on a hilltop and eat the chips that got puffed up from the pressure change back at the first pass. Adding a photo in light of yesterday’s discussion about overloaded backpacks.
Just a short stretch left to our destination, Les Grands Lacs. Right at the end we’re hit with a surprisingly steep climb, but we stop by the lower lake, Lac Caspi, because it’s filled with tadpoles and there are already little frogs too. I’d happily camp right there, but we push on. We arrive at 6:30pm. Other people are already camping here. We find a flat spot and pitch the tent. The sun’s still high, so we go wash up in the lake. It’s quite shallow and muddy, so you can’t swim in it, but we manage to have a decent wash with our mess tins.
Jozef cooks dinner — mashed potatoes, of course. Once we’ve eaten, washed up, and are lying in the tent with the sun still warming us, we just nod off completely.
We wake up sometime after 10pm and go brush our teeth. Outside it looks stunning. The moon is out and you can see the mountains reflected on the water’s surface. But it’s cold, so we quickly crawl into our warm sleeping bags.
