Tour du Mont Blanc, September 2025, Week 2
To celebrate my 50th birthday this month, I'm hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc, a 10 day trip counterclockwise around Mont Blanc in the Alps. This is week 2. Week 1 is here.
Sunday 9/14, Champex-Lac
This was the easiest day of the tour, only 10 miles and 1,700 feet of ascent. It went through a nice Swiss valley. I stopped off partway for a crepe. I'm resting a bit this afternoon.
I want to talk about my gear today. For this trip, I decided to go minimalist and only use one daypack. The main downside is that I have to do small amounts of laundry frequently, and even then the inside of the pack can smell a bit funky. The upside is...everything else. I didn't have to check luggage on the plane. I don't have to lug a suitcase around unfamiliar towns. Packing and unpacking are fast. I know where everything is. I don't have to think about my stuff much.
The other thing about gear is that the quality of it has really improved over the 40+ years I've been hiking. For this trip I bought a few things that I'm really happy with. I got a rain jacket that is very water resistant but also is lightweight and takes up very little space in my pack. I got a wide-brimmed hat where the back part is floppy and better covers my neck. I got a Garmin watch with GPS. I push a couple buttons on it to start a hike, and it shows me how far I've gone and how many feet I've ascended.
Maybe my favorite new piece of gear is my pack, an Osprey Talon. I'm really impressed with the design. The main compartment has two zippers, each running up one side of the pack, so I can fill stuff in at the bottom and zip up the bag partway to keep packing further up. There is a small waterproof compartment for my wallet and phone. The chest and hip straps are narrow. If I unclip the hip straps, they don't flop open but instead stay close, so I don't accidentally whack somebody with them. Clearly a lot of thought went into the design.
Anyway, I'm done raving about my gear. The trail continues in Switzerland tomorrow.
Monday 9/15, Trient
Today was a brilliant single shot of hiking that, to be honest, I wasn't fully expecting. The entire focus of the day was to get up to a very narrow col, at 8,600 feet the literal high point of the Tour for me, and then get down from it. The col is so narrow that it is called "the window of Arpette," Arpette being a small village that I passed by on the way up.
I been had worried because in the notes about this hike, my tour group had made it sound fairly technical and dangerous. There was an easier alternate route that I could have done. But from talking with other hikers and reading more about it, I thought it would be all right. And it was. It wasn't worse than anything I've seen in the Adirondacks, only a little longer and higher. And the views were amazing. There was a full-blown glacier on the other side.
The descent to Trient was steep but not too bad. Tomorrow I cross back into France. Tonight I'm getting drinks with some other hikers. What a good day.
Tuesday 9/16, Tre-le-Champ
I'm back in France and the Chamonix Valley. Today's hike was fairly short and uneventful. The higher elevations were socked in with clouds, but at the start of the day I was able to see the small notch in the high ridge I had come through yesterday. And when I was most of the way down, the sun came out and I got views of Mont Blanc and the rest of the massif. There were some tasty blueberries near the top.
Tomorrow will be a long hike but I will end up in Chamonix. The day after, I will do a day hike to "complete" the Tour. And that will be it for hiking here. I'm having a great time but I'm also looking forward to finishing.
Wednesday 9/17, Chamonix
Today I climbed up to Lac Blanc, a small lake 7,700 feet up on the ridge of mountains just to the north of the Mont Blanc massif. There were a few steep spots where they had installed metal ladders to climb up, which made things a little interesting. There were good views of the massif, but Mont Blanc itself remained in the clouds. I then gradually headed down the ridge, descending until I got to Chamonix. I started to see more signs of civilization, like paragliders and tourists hiking up from where they had been dumped out of a ski gondola. Tomorrow I'll do what is basically a long day hike up a mountain called Le Brevent further down the ridge I was on today, then down to where I started in Les Houches, a village just south of Chamonix. That will officially complete my tour.
After four nights staying in dorm rooms in mountain lodges, having a hotel room to myself feels luxurious. Now I need to figure out where to get dinner...
Thursday 9/18, Chamonix (again)
I'm done, and I'm tired, so I'll keep it short. Today was a perfect weather day and I kept taking pictures of Mont Blanc, which was, unusually, totally in the clear all day. I hiked Le Brevent, which is a neat mountain and one which I did in much less ideal weather about ten years ago. I got quiche and a beer at a "refuge" on the way down. Now I'm going out for dinner with some friends I met on the trail, who also finished today. All is well.
Friday 9/19, Turin
This post is a day late because I was traveling and celebrating my birthday. Thursday night I got dinner and drinks with some of the other hikers I met on the trail. Tony and Sabine (pronounced "Sabina") are Dutch, and Michel is American despite his name--he's from Reno, but his dad was French. They're all wonderful people, and it was fun celebrating the end of the trip, and my birthday, with them.
Then I got up the next morning and took a bus and then trains to Turin. I wandered around the city a bunch, got a birthday meal that couldn't be beat, and went to bed. In the morning I left for Rome.
Saturday 9/20, Rome
Just a few pictures from wandering around Rome this afternoon. My Airbnb is in a very old, very cool neighborhood. Like, the roof is clay tiles and the street is narrow and pedestrian-only. It's great.
Sunday, 9/21, Boston
This morning was a good one to leave Rome and Italy, because I found myself getting annoyed at a bunch of things: Tourists, businesses catering to tourists, and generally disorganized people on and around public transportation. Anyway, I got to the airport in time, and my flight home was boring and on time, and now I'm home. I have a lot of good memories from this trip, and now I'm plotting out my next backpacking adventures...