Les Chapieux to Courmayeur France into Italy

Day 5 - Hike into Italy under the dramatic south face of Mont Blanc.

We begin our day with a very traditional French breakfast: French bread with jam, plain yogurt, dry granola, and really good coffee. This breakfast is nice, but really lacking on the protein.  Lucky for us REI made us a special additional spread of food to supplement our breakfast.  Caroline has laid out a feast of prosciutto, pancetta, sopressata salami as well as the local cheeses.  This food banquet was so bountiful as well as beautiful, it was really difficult not to take something of everything. 

We leave by van for a two mile shuttle up a private road.  The road is open to farmers and guide shuttles, who have a special permit to use the road.  Caroline our shuttle driver and luggage mover extraordinaire, needs to go back and pick up our luggage after dropping us off.  Each day Caroline puts out a lunch buffet for us to pack up and put into our backpacks, sometimes shuttles us to a trailhead, and then returns to pick up our luggage to take it ahead to our next location.  She is not done yet, as she then leaves the luggage in our new hotel room, then shops for our food for the next day.  This service amenity is a great service perk! 

Today we begin our hike with an alp cheese farm tour. Danielle explains the basics of the cheese making process to us.  The cows are milked up on the hillside by using a solar powered milking machine.  The milk is brought down to the summer location to make the cheese.  In the cheese house we met one of the cheese makers.  He was busy stirring up a batch of cheese.  Each batch is around 200 gallons of milk.  The milk is placed in a large copper cauldron with a bit of yogurt-like starter culture to begin a lactic fermentation. After a couple hours something is added to curdle the casein in the milk. Satisfied with the curdling, the cheese maker uses two large scoops and something called a guitar to cut the curds into tiny grains.  When the grains are tiny enough, the cauldron is put over a wooden fire to cook.

During the tour we also visited the storage cellar where the cheese wheels sit to mature.  The cheese has to age for a year.  During the aging process each wheel of cheese has to be flipped over twice a week.  The big wheels weigh 70 pounds apiece. That is a lot of flipping cheese!

Today our trail leads us out of France and into Italy (from "bon jour" to "buon giorno!"). We start at the trailhead at the Vallée des Glaciers, and then climb east over the Col de la Seigne (8252').  This Col is the divider line between France and Italy.  No big border crossing, just a cement platform with writing on it.  Today there are big clouds in and amongst our views of the south side of Mount Blanc.  We have occasional views of Mont Dolent to the left of us. This mountain is considered a tri-point of France, Italy and Switzerland as all three boarders meet at the summit of the mountain. 

At some point during the day Danielle asks us if we would like to eat Raclette (pronounced like: haw colletes) at one of our upcoming dinners.  Danielle needs to phone in the order so the restaurant has enough on hand for us.  We have no idea what a raclette is other than a simple explanation of cheese and potatoes.  We are all game for the local cuisine. 

Coming down through the valley we encounter a few direct signs of World War II.  There are cement bunker houses, bunker caves and even a road built by Mussolini to land planes on the valley floor during the war. The road is easy to pick out as it is straight as an arrow amongst a very natural settings of nature.

Finally we descend into Italy to the less and less reflective Lac Combal. Since the glacier that fed this lake has receded, there is not the volume of water entering the lake. The lake is now just a mere pond. The lake is held back with a really large moraine wall of rock and scree which was pushed by a massive glacier from the sixteenth century. You could swim in this pond, in fact some of our group brought their swimming suits along today, but the puffy clouds now look more like rain clouds. We still have a long hike down to Courmayeur.

If the weather cooperates the views along our route will take your breath away! The dramatic southern face of the Mont Blanc range is fully exposed above us as we hike down to La Visaille.  Caroline meets us at the trailhead to shuttle us down to town.  If you are walking the tour unsupported, you will have about a another three miles to walk.  We arrive in the lovely Italian resort town of Courmayeur (4014').  Courmayer is Italy’s version of France's Chamoniex.  It is one long shopping town with restaurants mixed in.  These two towns are on opposite sides of Mont Blanc and are connected by a famous automobile tunnel.

We walk the length of the shopping district and Kathi finds one shirt.  We are waiting for the dinner hour because we are very hungry.  Sadly the dinner hour here in Italy does not begin until after 7 pm... We decide authentic Italian pizza is the only way to go.  We each eat a whole pizza.  I know! We each had a salad followed by a thin crust 12 inch pizza. I never thought of a whole pizza being a single serving, but in Italy it is.

After eating a whole pizza, you should naturally have dessert.  Again being in Italy, gelato is an obvious choice.  Wonderful Italian custard!  Danielle was kind enough to point out the best gelato shop for us. Gelato is supposed to be an amazing ice cream like dessert.  I am here to tell you it is amazing, but let’s just keep it a secret between you and me…it is just like eating custard ice cream of the mid-west!  Tastee, creamy, delightful, sweet, hmmmm who cares what you call it, just order some and enjoy every last lick. 

First whole pizza I ever ate by myself, experienced gelato .

Saw many remnants of WWII

Learned I need to say:  Buon giorno! Grazie, and ciao. Good day, Thank you and hello

Hiking: 9.5 miles. Elevation gain: 2,400 ft., Elevation loss: 2,740 ft.

Sign outside of the the Cheese dairy,  I think it says Beaufort cheese for sale. 

Brian a fellow hiker looks pretty cool standing here.

Can you see what we just hiked up?

Mont Dolent

Up at the pass Mont Dolent in the haze

Kathi is in Italy and I am standing in France

I Love the bright blue!  We only saw these flowers two days

Now a museum, this is the former boarder patrol control station

Easy to find trail markers

Busy trail today

Mountains in the haze, flowers in the front

Look carefully, do you see the tiny little WWII bunker cave?

Lunchtime, glacier to my right

Mussolini's airstrip

At the top of the rock/glacier there is a hut for climbers

Close up view of Mussolini's road.
Moraine can be seen to the left of the airstrip.

This is a cool picture

What is left of the lake.  In the middle of the picture you see a large
deposit of gravel... That is the moraine that a glacier left behind as
it pushed and ground it's it way down the valley and turned to the left.