from Tignes to Val d'Isere and back

The trails starts downhill from Tignes, towards the shores of the lake of the Chevril.
On the way down, the Gouille de Salin can be found. It's actually water from the glacier that travels underground and comes out here. The water travel is drawn on the next picture. It's in the shade, but if you look closely, maybe you can see it.

Dashed lines represent underground water, plain lines is water on the surface.
Here's another view of the Gouille.
The trail keeps going downhill and enters the woods of the Laye (that means woods of the female boar). I didn't see any boar. I barely saw anyone, anyway.
Sometimes the trees clear up a little a I can get a glimpse of the lake (and the dam).


Getting to the south en of the lake. The trail was carved in the cliff.
And finally, Val d'Isère. Not too hard so far since it was all downhill... but the the fun begins since I have to go back up to complete the loop.
The first part of the climb is in the woods, and VERY steep.
And then it gets above the tree line. In the back, the main village of Val d'Isere, and on the left, the valley that goes to the col de l'Iseran.

Still not too crowded...
I can see the ridge.
horses walk with me for the last yards up...
And here is the view: well worth the effort. A picture of the Mont Blanc in the back,
and a close up before I walk down to Tignes and a nice, ice cold drink on the balcony.

Canyon Lake

The sun is rising above Canyon Lake, on Sunday, Spetember 28th.

And I take this picture before disturbing the quiet waters with my filter-pump. I'm also enjoying a few minutes of solitude before the camp wakes up behind me...

As usual the trip didn't go exactly as planned. The Norwegian connection and I took along a new crew so we thought it would be wise to just plan on an easy road rather than following the Romney ridge.

It turns out Princess J had never been hiking, let alone backpacking, and besides the fact that she could not carry much, she was quite a demanding person. It made things a little harder a some members of the crew became maybe a little impatient at some point, especially Junior, who happened to be her tent-mate.

But overall the experience was a good one. 

The hike to the lake took us about 4 hours following Canyon Creek trail, a few miles west of Hamilton. It starts easily on the flank of Romney ridge, then winding through the trees along the creek. The slope progressively steepens to become a quite strenuous climb when carrying heavy backpacks.

We never saw the Canyon Falls, which were probably dry or very small at this time if the year.

We were relieved to finally see the dam that closes Canyon Lake on its east side. 

The lake was half empty. On the west side, there was Canyon Peak, our original goal, about 1500ft above us.

Since our group was not too enthusiastic about going any further, we decided to set the camp on the side of the lake and enjoy the last rays of sun.

For dinner: pasta, creamy mushroom and salmon, and bread and cheese. We had food for maybe 5 days! No wonder the bags were heavy! 

A little cherry bounce, marshmallows in the fire, and a perfect weather to look at the stars...

The next morning, same pace: a lazy breakfast as the temperatures - slowly - climb up, we pack the bags and start our hike down.

Even if we didn't reach our initial goal, it ended up being a nice little week end in the mountains. I don't think I'll ever get tired of this.

King of the Bitterroot

It's funny how this picture makes me feel discombobulated... I have to stop and look at it remembering where I took it to remember that, no, it is not upside-down.

I am actually sitting on top of Trapper Peak, 10157 ft, looking down at Cave Lake. You can see it if you look between the cloud on the right and the cloud at the bottom. Behind, a  ridge looking like a wall, separates Trapper Creek from the North Fork.

The hike up the highest peak of the Bitterroot is not a difficult hike. It climbs for about 4.2 miles, with an elevation gain of about 3800 ft from the trailhead, but, even though the start is scary, every steep fragment is followed by a little plateau, allowing us to recover before the next big effort. The end of the hike requires a little bit of scrambling on sometimes moving rocks - but again nothing terrible. Of course, one has to consider then who one hikes with: it can totally change the difficulty of the hike... 

Well my super-fit friends (I haven't found nicknames for all of them yet so I won't list the members of the happy party I went hiking with), who had just done an olympic distance triathlon the day before while I was probably watching TV laying on the couch, made my day a little harder since I had at some times a hard time keeping up with them.

The effort was worth it, despite the big cloud cover:

Here is the bowl between North Trapper Peak (to the left) and the East Trapper Peak (to the right) that I hope to ski before I leave the valley...

Here a little clearer view of the East Peak, and closer, the false peak preceding Trapper Peak, were most of the scrambling happens.

And finally, when the weather was cooperative enough, we could get a quick look at the Bitterroot Wilderness to the west of the peak.

The chilly temperatures chased us quickly from the summit. Fortunately, since the only two muscles I have happen to be my quads,  my downhill hike turned out to be much faster and smoother... And of course, by the time we reached the trailhead, the sky was (almost) blue and the sun shining. So we did what anyone else would have done in the same situation: we went to the Brewery.

The Yeti, Big Foot, and the bears

Every culture has its scary creatures. Usually, there live in the least hospitable area around, whether it's a deep forest or ominous mountains.The most popular are probably the Yeti believed to be wandering in the Himalayas, or its north american version, Big Foot.

Reading Wikipedia, I had a nice sample of some of them, and I hadn't heard of the majority of them, like the Akkarokamui, a gigantic fish-like octopus-like monster supposed to be in the Funka Bay in Japon, or the Brosno Dragon (West Russia), or the Maryland Goatman.

I think one of my favorites has supposedly been seen mostly in the Pyrenees, the mountains separating Spain from France: the Dahu.

There are various species of Dahu, on these pics, there's the Dahu dextrogyre (top) and the Dahu levogyre (bottom). The two uphill legs are shorter than the two downhill legs which means that they can only live on a mountain, and can only walk on it in one direction. The hunters technique is pretty easy: get one person at the bottom of the hill with a bag, send another one surprise the Dahu: the Dahu turns around and ... loses its balance and rolls down the hill, straight into the bag.

I have personally never seen one, despite many days of hiking in the Pyrenees.

But now, I wonder: does it mean anything?

 I read somewhere that there are at least 600 000 black bears in North America, more than 300 000 in the US. I've been living in Montana for almost 4 years - hiking as much as possible in the Bitterroot, went to Glacier, Yellowstone...

But then, I was worried and did not want to see any. 

I am always careful backcountry, hanging my food, not keeping smelly stuff in the tent, etc...

More and more the people I have been hiking with around my home have been telling me that as long as they are not in a National Park, they don't even bother: the bears associate humans to hunters and don't come close.

So when, two weeks ago, I joined friends to visit Yosemite, I thought that this time I would see bears! 

Well it was still not my moment... I loved the place, even though it was a little crowded... 

Unfortunately my friends were not so much into backpacking, so we just did a car-camping tour. Is it why the bears were still hiding from me?

We also went to Sequioa National Park (were the temperatures were much much higher - good thing the trees kept us in the shade - and again everywhere we could see warnings about bear and mountain lion sightings. 

After wandering on the Congress Trail, where I could not take a picture of an entire tree with my camera, we decided to go see the "jewel of the Sierras" (dixit John Muir): the Crescent Meadow. It looks like the perfect place for a bear, doesn't it?

I didn't see any. 

After we walked around the meadow, a woman jumped at us: "did you see it? did you see it?"

She was very excited. "No. I mean, I don't know. What are you talking about?"

"The bear cub! with his mum, just on the side of the trail you just took!"

My friends saw a black bear just outside of New York. My boss sees bear almost every time she goes to pick up huckleberries.

But for me, bears are like the Dahu, the Goatman or Bigfoot. Maybe it's not a bad thing after all?

Moisturized

Last week end I left the dry air of Montana to meet a friend in Oregon. I had not seen her for maybe 4 years - I guess that's since I moved here. Since she and her husband pretty much introduced me to backpacking, our plan was to meet friday night in Portland, have a nice gourmet dinner, and then head towards the Columbia River. Saturday was going to be a hike to Wahtum lake (starting from Eagle Creek Fish Hatchery Recreation Area, after the Bonneville dam) and hike out on Sunday. According to my friend it should be 14 mile roundtrip.

Well of course things don't always go according to plans.

The first problem was just making it on time friday. I had to run out of work to drive up to Missoula. It's about an hour from here, but I forgot about 1) the construction work on the highway, 2) the fact that half of the population in Montana tends to need to drive always exactly at the same time as me, and I noticed that they are never in a hurry when I am. 

Anyway I was at the airport 5 minutes before the check in time limit, just to see that the plane was going to be 1:30 hour late. No big deal... besides the fact that my friend does not have a cell phone so there was no way I could let her know about the delay. Then another delay in Seattle, where the airport was blocked because of a security breach. I'll never know what happened. But I have to say it was a weird thing to see all these people not moving, just waiting until someone tells them to start moving again.

The bottom line was I never made it for a gourmet dinner (arghhhh), we could just grab appetizers and a beer before leaving Portland.

The second problem was that the hike was not 14 miles roundtrip. It was 14 miles to the lake. Little difference. Of course we saw that at the trailhead, so we could have decided to go somewhere else, but neither of us knew the area so we figured we might as well hike up as far as possible, camp and then hike out the next day whether or not we saw the lake.

For someone who has essentially been hiking in Montana over the last years, Eagle Creek's popularity was quite overwhelming. I was ready to turn around when we entered the parking lot already packed at 9 am. We were not really by ourselves on a trail that could definitely fit strollers. It was nice and wide, more like a promenade than like a pack trail. The day was beautiful though, and the scenery fantastic. As the trail took us slowly uphill (3600 ft over 14 miles...), it became narrower and sometimes was just a ledge on the side of the mountain. 

Here the trails goes under the falls. Refreshing and a little scary:

We kept hiking up the trail, sometimes crossing creeks, sometimes stopping to enjoy the scenery. 

It took us 7 hours (I'm including the lunch break), but we finally made it!

Wahtum lake, elevation somewhere around 3700 ft. I took a quick dip before dinner - miso soup and pasta. A little piece of chocolate before snoring deedles. Sunday was going to be a long day.

And good thing we took pictures of the lake when we arrived, because when I got out of the tent the next day it was another story:

Definitely a rare weather for Montana, but I bet not that rare in Oregon. We could barely see the lake and we were camping on its shore!

Everything was wet. The tent in and out, the backpacks, the ground, the trees, and anything we encountered on our way down. I really don't know much about North American flora so I will not even try to name the plants. 

These ones had huge leaves and little thorns very irritating on the way down.

We didn't waste much time on the way down. We were on a tight schedule. And since the trail was almost flat, we knew we might not be much faster going downhill. We left the camp and walked for 4 hours non stop before our lunch break. It was kind of raining and most of the trail was in the forest with no open space for stopping, ferns and huge plants everywhere. The saturated atmosphere had some sort of mold smell, and that's when I realized that moss was everywhere, on the trees, on the cliffs, everywhere...

A last stop to look at falls

and then back to the trailhead - 6 hours after starting. I just had time to change my clothes, jump in the car and my friend dropped me at the airport. 

The trip back was eventless, my legs very sore, but thanks to Horizon I could sip a Sling Shot along the way, looking at Mt Hood, St Helens and Rainier sticking out of a thick layer of clouds.

I'll have to go there someday.