Mountain Circuit

On August 4, midway through our week in the Alps, we decided to take a road trip, one of the few times we used the car that week. Our first stop, after driving a couple hours over winding mountain roads, was at a small town called La Grave, where there is a ski lift that operates year-round. Cricket and Dave are shown here riding the first of two stages of the ride, from 4750 feet up to 7900 feet.

We immediately hopped on the second stage, up to 10,500 feet, despite the weather report we had seen -- 48 degrees with 20-30 mile-per-hour winds -- that was hardly encouraging. We think that wind speed was a vast underestimate, and Betsy was happy to be holding Dave's hand as we they walked out to the scenic overlook so that she didn't blow off the mountain. This family portrait near the top of the lift, courtesy of a nice Parisian couple we met on the lift, gives a bit of a sense of how cold and windy it was up there; check out Cricket's hair! Although our stay near the summit was brief, it did enable us to fulfill one of the main reasons for taking this road trip: It gave Molly a chance to glimpse Mont Blanc, which she had studied in school and really wanted to see. Apparently, the window of opportunity for seeing the famous peak closed pretty quickly, as Betsy and Dave (with the camera) saw only clouds during the approximately 20 seconds that Betsy let Dave stay at the wind-ravaged lookout point: Just enough to take a photo of the sign and capture this video:



Not surprisingly, we didn't spend much time above 10,000 feet. Instead we hopped the very next lift back down to the midway point, where the weather was actually quite nice. That was where we ate our lunch, not far from the glaciers that we had to assume are permanent fixtures on the mountain (it was August when we visited, after all).

The girls learned about marking mountain trials with cairns, so of course they had to make some of their own. The next three pictures are: One girl next to her cairn; two girls next to a cairn we found; and three girls busy collecting rocks for cairns. The impressive-looking mountain behind Betsy in the one-girl picture is called la Meije (just over 13,000 feet at the summit), and it is even more impressive close up than in a picture.

...and finally, one more photo from la Grave / la Meije: Sort of a high-altitude version of "where's Waldo": Find the ferret in this photo. (Answer at the end of this post.)

After finally descending the mountain and departing La Grave (marker B in this map), we continued clockwise in a big circle to Briançon (marker C). On this road, we traversed -- backwards -- part of the route of this year's Tour de France, stage 17 that started in Enbrun and finished with the legendarily difficult climb of l'Alpe d'Huez. We drove over the col du Lauteret, which the cyclists passed on their way up to the (also legendary) col du Galibier, and we can say that driving on those roads gives one a great respect for the riders in the Tour -- not to mention the hundreds of other bikers riding these routes along with the traffic on a typical summer afternoon.

If you look closely at the grand circuit we drove, you might wonder why we didn't simply backtrack to get home from la Grave. The real reason was that we wanted to go to Italy. Betsy in particular is very excited about going to new countries, even if we only set foot in them briefly (as we did in Germany and even, technically, Canada). And so it was with Italy. On our road map of France, the road from Briançon to the Italian border town of Claviere looks short and straight, so we reassured a dubious Molly that it wouldn't be too far out of our way to go get gelato in Italy. Well, Molly's doubts were well-founded, as the road is anything but straight: The curves are so tightly wound that they are not visible at a large scale. But take a look in this picture at one section of the road we had to travel!

In the end, we did make it to Claviere (marker D on the circuit shown above), though Molly almost refused to get out of the car in protest. But gelato conquers all, and so we all had a snack and bought a magnet before heading back to France. Aside: It was really strange to be in a place where neither of our two languages was the lingua franca (so to speak). The kids in particular seemed pretty freaked out by it.

After eating dinner back in Briançon -- where the town decorations are giant bicycles painted the colors of the important Tour de France jerseys -- we drove straight back to Saint Firmin via Gap. This is a pretty good distance, over 100km, but the road from Briançon to Gap in particular is much faster to drive than the mountain roads we had been on all day, including on our much shorter morning route. So we made it home (marker E) not long after bedtime.

Finally, the ferret: