Day 6: Refugio Elena to La Fouly (July 24)
14.2 km, 452.7 m ascent, 913.3 m descent
Oh, dorms. The bed was comfortable enough, to be sure, but I am much too old to bunk down with high school students and vigorous Germans. We were both up early.
Breakfasts in Italian refuges are especially sugary carb-heavy, with lots of white bread and marmalade and dry cookies. We’d been carrying our Savoie terrine for several days now, since we bought it in Les Chapieux. This was the perfect time to break it out and eat it for breakfast – some good salt and fat, and now I didn’t have to carry that heavy-ass glass jar.
Today was a short walk. Which was nice, because it rained the whole way. And turned cold.
We climbed up to the Grand Col Ferret and into Switzerland. The previous year, this climb had been a great challenge of this trip. This time, we barely noticed when we reached the top – partly because we couldn’t see it, and maybe because we did this first thing in the morning, and perhaps because last year that was on our second day of hiking, but maybe we were getting stronger?
I sweated through my shirt and my down vest, which promptly stopped providing any insulation whatsoever and required me to switch out jackets. We both find that down is not the greatest insulator in the Alps, which tend toward constant dampness.
The clouds persisted as we walked the flattish trail to the La Peule refuge. We arrived at the buvette too early to need food, though we did make us excellent omelettes last year. We got coffee while the girls prepped cheese for the day’s orders.
It was an easy albeit misty walk down the road to La Fouly.
This year, we stayed in Hotel Edelweiss. La Fouly is barely a town, but this hotel is an actual hotel with en suite bathrooms, unlike the auberge where we stayed the previous year. (Well, that place had showers in the rooms, but they were clear plastic pods right next to the beds, which made showering … awkward.) We took nice warm showers and rinsed out our clothes. All hotels in the Alps turn off their heat during the summer, there was zero chance that wet clothes would dry on their own, but the room supplied a hair dryer, which was useful.
We had osso bucco and steak frites for lunch in the hotel restaurant. After a nap, we visited the outdoor store outlet. Chris got a North Face fleece jacket and a Patagonia fleece vest – very finance bro. I got a Patagonia Nano Air hoody. This was a bit too warm for most of this trip, but it did become one of my favorite jackets over the next few years, so it was a good purchase.
After dinner in the hotel that night, we spent a quiet night in our room. It was nice to have a sort of rest day after yesterday’s epic slog.