Wednesday July 26, 21.5km/13.4mi

Refuge de Larribet (248.0km/2070m) (France) to Refuge Wallon (267.8km/1865m) (France) +1.7km Grande Fache

We awoke the next morning to beautiful blue skies, amazing!

We left at 8a.m. and hiked down the valley for an hour, and it was nice and warm.

We then began our gradual ascent up to the next pass. It was perfect conditions for a climb, we were in the shade but the skies were perfectly clear and dry.

Apparently they name their meadows here.

I saw some more of those Isard creatures. I think they are related to the chamoix that I’ve seen before in the Alps.

We hiked by the impressively blue Lacs de Remoulis.

At the top of the climb a few hours later, we came to a col and crossed into Spain. The France-Spain border has these stone markers all along it, they are numbered starting with number 1 at the Atlantic Ocean.

We descended for a short kilometer into Spain.

And then we quickly turned left and started climbing again towards Col de la Fache.

I could see the trail ahead in the talus field around this alpine lake.

I started seeing these purple wildflowers growing everywhere at this high elevation.

We got to the Col de la fache at 1pm. This technically isn’t on the HRP, but we wanted to climb the nearby peak, Grande Fache, which is 3,000m tall. So we dropped our packs and started hiking up the very steep trail.

Adam coming up below me.

We climbed up 300m, or a distance of only 800m, so expectedly some of it was a little steep and scrambly. Once we were at the top there was this little monument.

The views in all directions were amazing, I didn’t know the names of any of the other surrounding peaks but still enjoyed the time on the summit.

There was another group up there to get our photo.

These tiny purple flowers blanketed a part of the summit, which was roped off to protect the sensitive alpine vegetation.

We spent 30 minutes on top of the summit enjoying the views and the warm weather. I even got a phone signal so I could make a reservation phone call to a campground in the next town. Sweet. The descent was uneventful, and two hours after we left our packs, we were reunited with them. By now it was 4pm so we quickly got going, back down the other side of the col. It was a gradual descent all the way down to our planned campsite at the Refuge Wallon hut. We passed by a very large group in the middle of nowhere that was singing what sounded like religious songs. It was a very bizarre sight to see.

And down at the valley we went for two hours, through alpine meadows.

And eventually we descended far enough to enter a pine forest.

We got to the refuge Wallon at 6pm and set up our tents on the nearby grass under some trees. This hut was massive, with a capacity of 95 people, and very modern since it was built in 2021.

The inside was extremely impressive.

We had plenty of food, so instead of eating dinner in the hut, we made our own dinner at our tents. It was also a good way to save money since the hut dinners are usually about €17. After dinner we washed up in one of the hut’s five large bathrooms, and spent some more time exploring the huge space. While exploring the outside patio, I saw one of the grossest things ever. People had spread out their shirts to dry on a stone wall, which separated the patio from the meadow. There were cows grazing in the meadow very close to the wall, and one of them had an explosive poop all over a bunch of peoples’ shirts. Ugh.

It was a little overwhelming seeing so many people crowded into here, and I was happy to retreat back to the peace of our camping area. It was easy to fall asleep after all of the climbing we had done today.