Well we’re leaving Tuesday for our next adventure – a tour around Mont Blanc – hiking – about 100 miles and the book says about 36,000 vertical feet of climbing (yikes). Our hiking starts next Saturday 5-sept, and finishes the following Friday. We are doing a shortened version of the map, but honestly 100 miles is a pretty good distance with all the climbing.

I’ll try to post to the blog, but not guaranteed – we elected to go the ‘hotel’ route vs. the ‘Refugio’ route – largely so you can get a good nights sleep in your own bed – and your own bath/shower routine…

It funny the iterations you go thru doing a trip like this. I built an automated weather briefing using claude that has all of our points on it – it does a daily search builds out the day, 24 and 48 hour weather patterns ahead and suggested gear to wear. In this hike – you start low, but go high and can be exposed so important to bring the right gear. We are expecting in the lower spots to be around 65-70F as the high, but higher elevations could be 40-50F. The big thing is the wind – it was blowing 60 mph yesterday at the passes – so trying to figure out if we experience those conditions if it’s a ‘no go’ type of day. Hard to say – but the scout master in me says “hmm re-evaluate that…”

Packing for these things is fun – you lay everything out, then re-evaluate. Lay it out again, re-evaluate, add a little here, remove a little there and go thru scenarios – what if it’s hot what will you wear? What about pouring rain (typical) – rain pants, jacket, etc. Climbing up you get hot so it’s layering, and then coming down the temps up, but you aren’t working as hard – so layering back. “Gentle cool” is the advice I try to keep. We also have a lot of extra hydration packets, etc. The travel planning guide says basically take 2 liters of water – which is fine – the weight stinks of carrying water. There are spots along the way to refill. The one thing we learned in Scotland is that when it’s not hot you don’t drink very much – but this trek is a lot different.

I had coffee with an ex-scout master from our BSA troop, he is leaving almost the same day to do the route we did in Spain on the Camino de Santiago – should be much warmer for him and not so much elevation. He’ll have a great time. – Good Luck C.

Will be in Geneva on Wednesday – Chamonix Friday, start from there and then we will be going counter clockwise around the map. Camera at the ready!