Tuesday July 25, 17.1km/10.6mi

Refuge de Pombie (231.9km/2030m) (France) to Refuge de Larribet (248.0km/2070m) (France) + 1.0km wrong col

I woke up in the overflow tent at 6:30am, since the other people in the tent were also awaking then. I grabbed my breakfast and walked over to the hut, and noticed the fog had mostly cleared.

We started down the trail at 8am to partly sunny skies, enjoying our downhill walk for the next hour.

Near the bottom of the descent, I noticed the clouds were starting to build across the valley.

We would soon be hiking back up into that valley, and I hoped the clouds weren’t a rain threat. As we climbed the next hill, the fog returned and swirled around us.

We had a quick snack break at this strange little stone hut, which was built up against a boulder.

At the top of the climb there was a trail junction, where we had a decision to make. The normal route turns right and goes deeply up an exposed route with a cable for a hand hold. The weather seemed to be fine other than the fog so we opted for the normal route. (The detour would require us to like an additional hour and with a bunch of elevation gain and loss.)

The fog certainly was thick up here!

It was so thick, I was surprised by this lake until I was almost right next to it.

As expected the trail started to climb steeply…

… And then we begin the cable section.

It was actually really fun, and despite being cold and windy, it was pretty good conditions. This is the steepest part of the cable route, which goes for about 300m.

After that section was finished, we started to descend to a lake and a hut. The Lac d’Arremoulit is far below.

As we approached the lake the fog briefly started to clear.

For about 30 minutes it was sunny, and so we had a lunch break and dried our tents. It was pretty windy so we didn’t stay long, since the wind was so effective at drying the tents.

Our next climb was up the Col du Palas, which was filled with scree and talus.

Adam coming up the talus field.

When we got to the top, we were on the border with Spain. Immediately I noticed the clouds were mostly gone.

And a minute later they were almost completely gone, and we could see all the way down to a set of lakes in Spain.

We traversed over to the next col, which was slow going through the talus.

The weather was so clear on this side!

We had a little mis-navigation getting through the next col. We tried to go through the easier looking notch in the col, but it ended at a cliff on the other side. So we retreated, and tried the more difficult looking route. It had one tricky steep move but otherwise was fine.

Of course, once we got to the other side and were back in France, it was foggy again.

For a few hours we descended down this valley past several lakes.

The trail was pretty rocky but the lakes were amazing to see in the diffused light.

Eventually we descended back into the fog.

The hut was a welcome site at the end of a long day.

We setup our tents in the designated area below the hut, and went inside and had dinner at 7pm.

The huts are quite well organized and they have a shoe room at the entrance to keep people’s footwear out of the main building. There were so many crocs!

Dinner was great, it was some sort of chicken noodle dish. Unlike last night, I didn’t stay up late socializing and playing card games, and went to bed early at 9pm.