Tuesday 14 January 2014 - A Walk from La Croix Fry

Wet, light snow continued to fall until after 10am, allowing us the luxury of another lie in before catching the eleven o'clock bus up to La Croix Fry. 

By the time we disembarked the cloud had lifted sufficient for occasional beams of sunlight to sear into the fresh white deposits. The trees responded by dunking their overnight burdens on any passing shadow. 

For a while we enjoyed fine views of the crète leading towards La Grande Balmaz (2616 metres). The ridge is pictured behind Sue. It has no footpaths. 

The Mont Blanc massif poked its head out of the clouds for a short while, but soon mist descended again to around 2500 metres, with swathes of cloud lower down at various levels. 

We left our skis at home today, in deference to some slightly irritated and rarely used muscles. Nor were the snowshoes borrowed from Chantal and Joël deployed. It's debatable as to whether these would have made our walking tour of the Beauregard Plateau any easier, but we managed fine without them so long as we kept to the piste reserved for walkers,  where the 30 cm or so of snow that had fallen overnight had been nicely tamped down.

There was hardly anyone about, just some sweet singing birds to keep us company - a huge contrast to the hordes of folk we saw up here on Sunday.  But with no picnic bench to be found, and with picnickers not welcome at the mountain huts, we were obliged to lunch on the piste. Very nice it was too, until the last bite of chocolate removed one of my front teeth!  Just a razor sharp stump remains, but at least my sympathetic dentist can see me at 9am on Monday. 

From the plateau, we took the easy path down to La Clusaz, on which snowshoes would have been a hindrance. Two children on skis flew past, giving us quite a fright - we saw very few others on today's trails.

Back at base by 3.30pm, after our 13 km stroll, resulted in plenty of 'down' time, during which I was pleased to be able to move on from the Hunger Games trilogy.

Tonight we are treating our hosts to a meal at La Cordée. I hope no more of my teeth go awol!

Sent from France