Day 10

15.5 miles

Marmotte sightings: 0

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Another attempt at a less arduous day today, another complete fail on that front!  But another stunner of course.

We decided we’d aim for St-Gervais-Les-Bains, a village along the valley, which is reputed to be like the Chamonix of 50 years ago, and we’d found a route description that promised easy flat running along a ridge – perfect!

We headed off along the lovely river path to Les Houches, crossed over into the the village and found the Bellevue cable which gave us a rapid boost up the mountain.

There was a lovely train that clawed its way up the mountain from St Gervais, and incredible views of Mont Blanc behind us.

When cycling we always enjoy going over numerous cols, usually our highest points of the day to target, but from Bellevue we had the unusual experience of dropping down to the Col de Voza and immediately climbing again the other side towards the Prairion peak at 1,969m.

It was incredibly hot, over 35 degrees, and the skies were stunning blue, a great day to enjoy this amazing panoramic spot, a genuine 360.

From Prairion it was quickly obvious that the author of the article promising the ridge run (a) hadn’t been here and (b) couldn’t read a map.  It was a ridge but we literally plummeted down on a micro-thin path towards the Col de la Forclaz, and then on down to St Gervais.  We will forgive the author because Prairion was fantastic and we should obviously have been less trusting and looked at the map more closely ourselves!

We then soaked in the St Gervais/ Chamonix of Old vibe with a bistro lunch on the main square.

The final part of the run was to St Gervais Le Fayet train station, a bit of a budget airline style cheeky use of the charming St Gervais name, as we had to run 2 miles down to an ugly town, back in the ‘real world’ instead of our idyllic mountain haunts!  The train chugged us back to Chamonix.

It was far from a gentle day, especially in the heat but fun to explore a further part of the valley and begin to get the feel for the geography of the valley.