Today was an early start out of Courmayeur in Italy over the border and back in to Switzerland and to Champex for the night. It wasn't a long hike day but there were multiple bus connections that we had to catch. We were up early and packed and ready to go when the bus station opened at 8:30. We had washed some clothes the night before but some of them were still damp. Into our bags they went, wrapped in plastic shopping bags. We hoped they wouldn't be too stinky by that evening when we had a chance to hang them again. We had seen some people hiking with wet socks and underwear hanging off their bags but since they day looked rainy again, we didn't want to try that sort of public drying method.
We left Courmayeur on the first bus at 9:00 and rode for about an hour to Arnuva in the Val Ferret. The bus dropped us off in what appeared to be the middle of no where and once it drove off, we knew we were stuck. The Austrian couple that we kept running into was also on our bus so we knew we were in the right place or lost together.
We started hiking up the road / trail and after a steep 2.5K climb reached the Refuge Elena. It had already started raining at this point and we knew it would be a wet day. We didn't stop at the Refuge but did take a little peanut butter ball break. The train converged here and there was a fair amount of people headed up the next climb. The train got narrow, rocky and steep and we had a rapid 475 meter gain in the next 3K. We were on our way up to Grand Col du Ferret.
Along the way, we were overtaken by a small, skinny girl who was super tromping up the trail. She passed me like I was standing still. Her parents followed, huffing and puffing behind. Her mother stopped to get her breath by us and we had a brief conversation. They were from Minnesota on their summer break. The daughter was 11 years old and this was her first hiking experience. She was loving it and her parents were having a hard time keeping up. I could envision Heidi running with the goats through the mountain meadows... Oh to have young legs again!
Shortly after they passed us we heard a buzzing in the sky, we could see a parachute device with two men being powered by a big fan. It circled us for the next hour or so trying to gain height but stay below the cloud cover. Right before we started on the last snow field to the top, I finally spotted a Ptarmigan. He was in the process of changing color from white to brown and was sitting stoically on a rock overlooking a cliff. By the time we got to him, he was gone but the only way down was over the cliff. What a beautiful little bird.
The last push to the top of the Col was over a snow field and it was the first truly dangerous snow field we had encountered. If you slipped on this one, you had about 50 feet to catch yourself before pummeling over a cliff and down into the valley below. Thankfully the snow was warm and sticky and it was a short cross over. The clouds were low and we couldn't see as we were crossing that we were right by the top. At the top was a full production camera crew, the men buzzing about overhead (we now saw they also had cameras) and a bunch of people wearing matching shirts. It was for some type of extreme adventure race. They won't let us cross until they were done filming but once they did, we crossed over into Switzerland and started our descent.
My knees had been bugging me bad at this point and the descent is the worst, but it just kept feeling more painful every day. As I started down into Switzerland, I felt a pop in my right knee and what felt like liquid flowing internally. It got very painful and the only way to walk was with my leg fully straight and to swing my leg around, Frankenstein style. We managed to get down to the next refuge which was an old dairy farm in La Peule and by then my knee and ankle were starting to swell. We knew we didn't have much further to go that day so we decided to press on.
The final stretch was road walking for 5K down the valley and into the town of Ferret. We walked along slowly and stopped frequently. Right before we got into the town, we saw a group of high school age kids on a camp trip. They were learning how to cut down trees with axes and double saws. We stopped to watch them and as we did, I looked up to see the bus pull away ahead of us. When we got to the bus stop, we saw the next one didn't come for another two hours. Nothing in town was open and the rain was pouring down. We decided to walk to the next town, La Fouly, 2K further to see if we had better luck. After we started we ran into two american couples that were staying in La Fouly. We had a nice chat with them on the way down. It was a distraction from the knee pain.
We got into town and thankfully it stopped raining. The bus was the same wait but Glade went to find out if there was any other way down. He stopped into a sporting good store and a very nice lady, Lulu, who was repping backpacks, offered to give us a ride. She gave us a ride down to the next big town of Orsieres and we were able to catch a bus to Champex-Lac. We arrived at town at about 6:30 and once there were told our luggage never arrived. I called our tour company and they proceeded to find out what happened to our luggage.
So dirty and stinky, we went out to eat and met up with some friends of ours from the US, who had driven up from Geneva to meet us, Wade and Andrea. We had a lovely dinner and catch up but when we got back to the room, still no luggage. It had been located and would be waiting for us the following day. We didn't have clean socks or underwear, no tooth brushes, and no new contacts or contact case for me. I was also thinking about our wet stuff we had wrapped up that morning, just getting gross and stinky in the bag. Oh well, trying to get a good nights sleep and we will figure it out in the morning!
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