A personal journal recording and reflecting on my walks around the world.
My first visit to Chamonix was in 1993 when I walked there from the shores of Lake Geneva doing a section of the GR5. Thirty years later I walked there again taking the long way round from Les Houches when hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc. Last summer I actually got to drive into town when Mish and I headed off on our summer road trip to the French Alps.
Continue reading “A walk along the Grand Balcon Sud, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc”
The car park for the Falls of Kirkaig is empty when we arrive with two steak pie and mashed potato dinners purchased twenty minutes earlier from Lochinver Larder but still hot. “How many other vans do you think will turn up, three, four?” I muse over our meal. Mish looks out of the window at the April showers and lowering temperature and confidently predicts “none”. Surely not, we’re in beautiful Assynt, surrounded by ancient woodland with the Kirkaig river not twenty feet from us. When I look out the window in the early hours the rain has stopped and we are alone, with just the owls, the roaring river and a billion stars twinkling in the ink black night sky to keep us company. Wives, why are they always right.
It’s the second day of a settled weather pattern that has brought crisp, calm and freezing weather to Lakeland. There is not a breath of wind and the bright sun shines down from a cloudless azure sky. The air clarity is as clear as crystal. It’s pretty much perfect walking weather and I’m looking forward to my first walk in the Central Fells, a walk up Walla Crag and Bleaberry Fell.