Day 3: Les Chapieux to Cabane du Combal (July 21)
18.5 km, 1,140.5 m ascent, 775.7 m descent
Oh, my calves were sore this morning!
Lots of our fellow guests at the Auberge de la Nova in Les Chapieux took vans up the road to la Ville des Glaciers (neither a city nor particularly glacial), but we are purists so we walked up through the valley. We saw a whole family of marmots playing!
After the previous day’s climb, this walk felt relatively easy, even if it was on the longer side.
The climb up to the Col de la Seigne was cold and windy. The views from the col were gorgeous, though the clouds were closing in. We were entering a new country – Italy! We also walked back into signal as we crested the pass – so many messages awaited us on our phones!
Rifugio Elisabetta is the usual nighttime stop on this stage, but we were going further, to the Cabane de Combal. We stopped at the Rifugio to have a quick lunch of spaghetti bolognese. This gave us an opportunity to check out the accommodations we might have had and to feel happy we weren’t staying there. The bedrooms were crammed with densely packed bunks, and the whole place smelled like socks and farts.
We made our way another hour or so down the trail to the Cabane de Combal. We were slightly anxious about this place, which we feared might be even more rustic than Rifugio Elisabette – what on earth might that look like?
Our fears were ungrounded. The Cabane was newly built, bright pine, and we had a double room with an en suite shower, as luxurious an accommodation as any we’d experienced. It’s much smaller than Rifugio Elisabetta, so there weren’t the crowds you sometimes see in refuges.
That night I tried the local herbal liqueur called Génépi, a lovely wormwood-infused digestivo said to re-oxygenate the muscles. I quickly decided that I would become a Génépi fiend!
