August 3, 2024

Auberge La Flégère to Les Houches 

10.6 miles

There’s something nice about doing a circular hike. It’s like completing a ring, making it back to the beginning. I do love a full-circle ending, me. Tie up all those loose ends, make it all connect. Bring us back to where it started. 

You know the drill by now: wake up, contacts in, breakfast in the refuge dining room. We eat with the same folks from last night and wish each other a pleasant end to the hike and safe travels.

Unfortunately, the morning is quite misty, and though the guidebook promises excellent views, we get none of them as we cross more ski pistes towards the final uphill. 

That is, we get no views until we’ve gone about three miles. We take a snack break before the climb to Le Brévent and then, all of a sudden, the clouds part, and a snowy mountain springs into view in the distance. I check PeakFinder, and sure enough, it’s Mont Blanc. There she is, the only mountain we can see, the monarch of this massif, making herself known once again on this final day of hiking. A cable car makes its way across the line in front of us, making the scene and its scope even more dramatic. 

For some reason, the hill that comes right after this absolutely destroys me. I feel tired, sluggish, exhausted, missing something fundamental in my diet, maybe. I put in some music and slowly grind up the incline.

It’s not very long, though it gets rocky and creepy at the top and I start feeling really chilly and also kind of weirded out. It’s giving higher elevation Brooks Range here: no sun, no grass, snow patches, all rocks. There are a couple of Sierra-grade sketchy snow patches that get my heart beating. 

As we’re creating the first peak of the climb, I stop for a breath and look to my left. Then I gasp. 

“Oh my god!” I can’t get Grace’s name out. “Look! There!” I’m pointing wildly. 

Grace sees and gasps as well, then she pulls her camera out. I follow suit. The animal I’ve spotted is a boquetín, a type of ibex. At first I think it’s a chamois, which is another ungulate that lives in this area, but by this animal’s larger horns I’m pretty sure it’s a boquetín. 

What a gift! First a perfect cloud-framed view of Mont Blanc, and now an animal we’ve been hoping to see the whole time. Okay, TMB. We see you. Thank you for this farewell. 

My warm fuzzy feelings only last until we have to start scrambling upwards over rocks to complete the climb to Le Brévent. There are some unpleasant loose rock piles and we lose the actual trail a couple of times. 

I spot some ladders on a rock face in the distance. Ugh. Fine. I collapse my poles into my pack and prepare to go up. There are two women coming down though, and I wave them through first.

“It will be slow!” one of them warns.

“That’s fine, I’ll be slower,” I reply. 

They make it down the pointy slope, and as the first one passes me, I spot a PCT tag. 

“When did you do the PCT?” I ask.

“In ‘22.”

I’m ecstatic. “Me too!” 

She started on April 21, two days after me, but I don’t recall meeting her. It’s so odd how trails are like that. The other woman has arrived by now, and it turns out she hiked the PCT in the same year, but starting in March. The typical conversation ensues: other trails we’ve hiked, how the TMB compares to the PCT, when we’re doing to do the CDT. 

“What’s your trail name?” the first woman asks. I tell her, then I ask theirs. They’re Dirty Dog and the Duchess. 

I don’t know how to explain this feeling of meeting others who have hiked the same long American trails as me. It’s such a specific experience and we are such specific weirdos. By merely signaling that we have this one particular experience in common, so many other niceties aren’t required. It’s like meeting people you’ve never met and instantly knowing them like you know a close friend. 

I’ve been feeling a lot of nostalgia on this trail, both for the PCT and other experiences: the AT, the Camino, my winter in the Netherlands, summers in Spain. In particular, these landscapes just remind me so much of the Sierras, and of Washington, and now that it’s the end of this hike I can’t help but think back to the end of the PCT. It hurts, but in a way it’s also tender almost, like gingerly checking a bruise or eating a cinnamon roll that’s just on the unpleasant edge of too sweet. A part of my heart snapped off that September and still lives on that leaf-strewn path by Ross Lake at the Canadian border. And now another will dislodge and belong to this ring around Mont Blanc. You leave a piece of yourself in the places you walk through. And you gain something else.

At the summit, which we finally reach a while later, there is a restaurant. Grace and I have both been fantasizing out loud about hot chocolate. She orders one when we get there, but I opt for coffee, which suddenly sounds so great. It is. So is the Nutella crepe (Grace’s is blueberry). One final mountain meal. What a treat! This is one aspect of the TMB that is endlessly excellent and fascinating to me, and I don’t think it would ever get old. 

The descent, as FarOut aptly describes it, is “interminable-feeling.” It’s rocky, but there are some green patches. I start to dissociate for a while. There aren’t really many other hikers around and the quiet is nice. 

Grace breaks the silence about a mile down. “What’s that? Is it a dog?”

I spot the shape moving in the distance that she’s referring to. I get out my camera and zoom in. 

“No, it’s a marmot!”

Another creature spotting, another nice farewell from the Tour du Mont Blanc. 

It starts to get hotter as we descend, and then we get to the place beneath the clouds and the sun is shining here and I am sweltering. What is up with the temperature extremes? Everything is so intense in the mountains. Down, down, down. We can see Les Houches down there in the valley. Can we hitch a ride with one of the paragliders? Can we get a cable car installed right here? 

We pass by a sign for a zoo, and then a parking lot. A little while later we wind up right near the statue of Christ-Roi, Christ the King, that we noticed up on this hill while we were in Les Houches at the start. It’s a pretty spot overlooking the town. There’s an enormous bell behind the statue that probably lets out an almighty sound across the valley. 

The final mile is through a lovely pine forest followed by some road walking. In the forest I try to soak up the last moments of summer, of adventure, of being on a trail, getting to be this version of me, my hiker self, before Passport has to go dormant again. We switchback gently down, down, and then we are on the road that leads to town.

Through a neighborhood, across a bridge over the river, then across the highway. I suddenly notice water pouring out of a concrete structure spanning the highway. 

“Look!” I say to Grace. “That looks like a… a water bridge.” I can’t figure out how to describe it.

She looks where I’m pointing. “Oh, like an aqueduct?”

I make a face. “Wow, I’m dumb. I told you, hiking makes you have a smooooth”—I rub my palm over my head to emphasize the smoothness—“brain.” Whatever, I like “water bridge” better. But maybe this is an indication that it’s time to start using my intellect again. 

We make a right turn and we’re on the main road going into Les Houches. We pass some familiar sights, like the sporting goods store, the bridge over a creek, and then the church. One more walk around the back of the church building, and then we can see the archway. 

Jeanne and George are waiting at the bus stop as we pass. “Yay, Grace and Sarahmarie!” they cheer, clapping, as we pass. “You did it!” 

We did indeed. At the sign we take photos, mirror-image versions of the ones we took eleven days ago at the start. We made it all the way back here. Full circle. Another hike complete. Another amazing summer. 

Our hotel for the next two nights is in Chamonix, the famed skiing, climbing, and mountaineering town that’s a short bus ride from Les Houches. Walking into our own hotel room and setting our stuff down, knowing we’re done hiking and that we can just relax, feels lush. 

We spend the evening at the pool and hot tub, the latter of which is really not all that hot, but it’s still nice. There we meet two women from Spain and have a nice chat with them for a bit. The pool is actually pretty warm, not that much cooler than the hot tub, so we enjoy a swim as well. Finally, we end the night with drinks and dinner—burgers, somewhat ironically—at a restaurant with an outdoor terrace where we can watch the world grow dim over the mountains. 

And that’s all there is to say, really. It was a gorgeous, incredibly special hike, and I’m so glad Grace texted me all those months ago asking if I wanted to do the TMB with her. I feel grateful and content to have experienced a new trail in a beautiful place. 

Now it’s time to settle in for a while. I need to actually heal my stupid foot injury, plan for the new school year, and rest for a couple of days before the grind starts back up. I need to get back on a normal diet and stop hemorrhaging money. But I wouldn’t change anything about this hike for the world. It was different than other trails I’ve done—it couldn’t get MORE different from the SHT—but it still felt like the most natural thing to be walking in the mountains. I will be thinking about the glaciers and the snow-capped massif forever. The marmots and the ibex. The blue of Lac Blanc. The novelty of being able to order a beer, a crepe, a bowl of soup in the mountains. The TMB is a darn near perfect hike, and I cannot recommend it enough. 

If you’re reading this, thank you. Thanks for following along on my little adventures. I may not be on the PCT anymore, but writing about any hike allows me to process and remember it. It means a lot to me that you’re still here. It makes me feel like I have little invisible guardian angels on my travels, like there’s something bigger than myself that gets to experience these places. I hope you feel like you’re a part of all of this, too. 

Passport is taking a rest for now, but she’ll be back. Which trail is next? Who knows! You could hike every trail you hear about in this world and never run out of miles of beauty. What a comforting thought.