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A Bad King posted:I have a few friends planning a 12 day trip in order to make this 100 mile hike, and we were invited to join them. The wife and I have hiked portions of the Appalachian trail outside of Pennsylvania and the Inca Trail in Peru, but that's the extent of our experiences on multi-day duration hikes in elevation. Do you mean literally Mont Blanc, or do you mean La Haute Route? I've done several legs of the route. It's honestly not that high--rarely if ever above 3000m--so you probably don't need to acclimate, but sleeping at elevation (personally) wrecks me unless I'm well acclimatized for 3-4 days, which is why I've only done legs as day trips. A lot of the huts/hotels are around 2200-2500m. It depends how fit you are. If you're sore after Day 2, then it's going to be tough to do another 10 days of hiking. It also depends what your backup plans are for bad weather, which over 12 days is almost certainly going to hit you with a thunderstorm which could be quite dangerous at many points in the route. Fortunately it's pretty easy to just skip parts of it — so you can take a bus down and hang out in Sion or Martingy or whatever, then go back when the weather's nice and continue or just skip to the next leg. You don't need a guide or anything, it's all super well posted and signed. But, make sure to have a topo map with you, ideally a digital one if you will have a phone with GPS, e.g. https://map.wanderland.ch/?lang=en&route=all&bgLayer=pk&layers=Wanderland&resolution=22.55&X=613125&Y=107572 . Unfortunately I've still never found such a website that has more legible maps than that, which is annoying because many of the routes are only visible at high-mag but there's no way to select one, and at high-mag there are like a million routes that make it kind of hard to figure out. In summer, huts and mountain hotels can book completely out, especially on weekends. So, book ahead (if you can, sometimes yes sometimes no) or bring a tent. I did the Salkantay trek and it was similar in difficulty to the parts of the Haute Route I've done. Long downhill sections are more likely to ruin your next day(s) than uphill sections, regarding leg soreness.
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# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 11:45 |
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# ¿ May 6, 2024 12:50 |
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A Bad King posted:Is there a significant crowd on the trail? No. Since everyone starts at completely different times of day, you'll cross people fairly often and always see people in the distance, but almost never in large groups except around obvious stopping areas on the route (e.g. cols and local summits). It's not like Inca Trail when all the groups arrive and start at basically the same time. Even though it's not crowded, huts/hotels are reasonably likely to book out, especially since sometimes big groups will book an entire hut (e.g. schoolkids on summer break). They usually allow you to camp on the property and use their facilities though for a few francs. The Tour du Mont Blanc is also a hiking route of similar difficulty, length, and location as the Haute Route. I've done much less of that (only the northern ~quarter between Les Houches and Champex), but I'd guess it's more or less the same conceptually as La Haute Route the whole way. Tour du Mont Blanc: http://www.chamonix.net/sites/default/files/nodeimages/trailbl-tour-du-mb-0004.jpg?itok=0DBwFXKh Haute Route: http://www.alpineexploratory.com/images/maps/walkershauteroute-map.gif E: This route comparison also makes them look pretty similar https://www.alpenwild.com/staticpage/tour-du-mont-blanc-vs-the-haute-route/ . Apparently Tour du Mont Blanc has more people on it (which is personally surprising, since everyone I know has picked to do the Haute Route, but maybe that's because I've been living in Switzerland and not France..). I'd be surprised if "crowded" for Tour du Mont Blanc meant anything like "crowded" on the Inca/Salkantay trails, except the parts immediately near Courmayeur, Chamonix, and Zermatt. If you're planning on tent camping, I guess you could just get into Chamonix and decide on the spot regarding weather forecasts which route to take and which direction to go. Saladman fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Mar 8, 2017 |
# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 14:57 |