Day five
Injuries: Few more bruises but nothing 'gnarly'
Cash: Horrendous, have just spent 40 Euros on a couple of tins of beans, some chocolate and a green salad.
Weather: What do you think?
Thought I'd have a relaxing day off today. The other guys in the chalet have been bitten by the mountain biking bug and as I am immune to the charms of that particular sport I decided to leave them to it and have a chilled day at Lac de Montriond instead. Nicky and I thought we might walk it seeing as it was only light rain but when we asked at the ski lift the attendant said it would be about a five hour walk so we thought we'd look for an alternative ramble instead and head to the Lake later in the afternoon for a bit of kayaking or swimming to recoup my energy.
We took the bubble lift cable car up to Super Morzine to see which tracks to do.(disappointingly not an actual bubble, would take about a hundred bottles of fairy liquid and an extremely healthy set of lungs to get something that large airborne). Getting off the lift we asked the two lift attendants if it was possible to walk to the lake from there. The lift attendants looked like a pair of off-duty (on strike?) French farmers; they took one look at us clean-cut city girls and reckoned we wouldn't want to do that as it was a bit of a tough route. They suggested we took a girlie route instead where we could pick wild raspberries and mushrooms and then go and cook up something pretty for the men folk when they came down from the mountain. Ok, they didn't actually say that but you could see in their faces that they didn't exactly have us down as the female Bear Grylls.
They pointed us in the right direction and we demonstrated just how wrong they had been about our survival skills by promptly going the wrong way and having to walk past them again. I pretended to point out something fascinating in a hedgerow so we didn't have to see them laughing as we skulked past. 'Oh look, a wild raspberry, that would make a really nice tart...'
Walking tracks are noted as 'Nordic Skiing' which suggests that the Norwegians possibly got a bit confused about the seasons and to cover it up pretended that they had meant to be skiing on grass, in summer and that this was the way they did it in Norway. Big plus for all you spreadsheet fans out there - each trail shows a pie-chart of percentages of types of terrain encountered on the way. I went for one that was 1% ashphalt, 49% grassland and 50% forest - track 7 on the map in a little red box.
See now right there should have been a warning to me - if you are skiing and you see something is marked as red it means it's a red run, one down from the toughest black runs. I just thought it was a cheerful colour and the helpful gradient graph next to it showed it as a bit of a hill but relatively short. I hadn't bargained on it being the stair lift track, virtually vertical in places with vicious surface tree roots. I could almost hear the lift attendants laughing as I stopped, holding onto a tree for the umpteenth time whilst I attempted to get my heart back into waltz time, or at least to stop it from 'techno rave on speed' time. At one point I swear it actually stopped - probably went on strike demanding better pay and conditions.
We passed a couple of English people on the way and they thought we were crazy - 'why didn't you take the lift?'. The reason we were doing the chair lift without chairs or lift is because I hate them; they scare the pants off me. I'm ok on things like 'The Nemesis' at Alton Towers where your legs dangle but you are chucked about at such speeds almost hitting obstacles that that is the least of your worries. Lurching around over a grassy piste with a bit of rusty piping between me and certain death is not my idea of fun. Nor is having nowhere to look but down, or at the two kids snogging on the lift in front.
Anyway, in true 'misinform your fellow walkers' style, they told us that the path 'levelled-out' in about five minutes. They would have been right if by 'levelled' they meant 'got steeper' and if by 'five minutes' they had meant 'for flipping ages'. Seeing a sign for a track ending at a lookout point over the Lake, we decided if we couldn't walk to the lake, we could at least make the two-hour round trip to take pictures of it from far away.
This was nice in principle...
What we hadn't counted on was the amount of rain that had fallen since my arrival in town (Steve and Nicky have nominated 'Weather with You' as my theme tune). The trip to the lookout involved slippery rocks next to sheer drops, mud of the sticky and the slippery kind - you get to know the difference pretty quickly when you put all your weight onto the wrong one and go sliding back down the hill on your bum or do one of those cartoon 'running on the spot' moments as you try to get your balance. I got very used to shouting 'I'm ok' from beyond the next precipice as I vanished at speed along an impromptu mudslide shortcut.
Eventually we came to the sign that said ten minutes to the lookout and breathed a sigh of relief. Prematurely as it turned out. The lookout was down a steep slope and the path dealt with this like the mountain roads do - zigzags and hairpin bends. The path was just about big enough for a man and his dog to get down but it was full of slippery mud and rocks that skidded off in the opposite direction when you tried to walk on them. To my irritation, having made it to the lookout point, there was no bench to collapse onto, only a railing - presumably put there to catch you in mid-flight as you career down the last bit of the descent.
Going back up the path we met another walker in a similar state of terror - 'Is it far?' he said with a voice of dread. Luckily we could tell him that it wasn't - the relief was palpable. On the way up which was much easier, we saw various other walkers sliding past us on whatever body part hit the ground first - a bit like extreme skeleton bobsleigh for the over 50s.
Anyway, we were about as muddy as we had ever been in our lives so we decided to go the whole hog and do the rest of the path down to the lake. I mean, it couldn't get any worse could it? Hahahaha! Yup, it could. The onward path threw up an angry herd of cows, EVEN MORE MUD and then disappeared into the forest to confront us with great big boulders to scramble down and sheer drops into the trees. We gave up chatting because we were concentrating on not killing ourselves. Sometimes there just didn't seem to be a path at all, just a sheer gulley down to the forest floor.
Having somehow made it past a particularly tricky bit, it suddenly got all Famous Five as we discovered an old slate mine. 'I say ' said Nicky, 'What larks! Our path appears to have turned into a mine tunnel straight into the mountain. How jolly'. 'Spiffing!', I agreed. 'If only Timmy were with us, he would love all these bones that seem to be lying around here. Oh look, this pile is wearing a 'North Face' anorak and there's a water bottle here and a note. Gosh Nicky, it says 'I only wanted to get to the lake to sunbathe!' Do you think it's in code?'. 'What a smashing place for a picnic' said Nicky as she eyed the sharp stones and sheer drop surrounding the mine entrance, 'It's a pity that we didn't bring any home made lemonade and pork pies as we thought we'd only be out for a couple of hours - oh, and we're vegetarians.'
We got past the old mine, slipped and scraped our way down another couple of tricky descents and almost literally ran into a sad-looking French couple. They said hello, we asked where the hell the path was and they pointed apologetically to a barely discernible track to the left. 'It's a bit slippery' they added. We looked at them, they looked at us, or what they could see of us for the mud and scratches. We all looked back at the path we had just fallen down. Nuff said. Yup, hate to break it to you Frenchies but it isn't any better where you're headed.
We slid over to the place they indicated to find ourselves at the top of what can only be described as a waterfall. It was sort of a natural staircase made of slippy rocks with a cascade of rain running down them. In true Via Ferata fashion, there was a helpful chain at one side to stop you from falling off the mountain. At least we recognised this and knew how to use it. It was still a bit more hiking than we had signed up for that morning. The slippy rocks then gave way to a man-made staircase of logs - ABSOLUTELY LETHAL IN THE WET. That's a broken leg right there so we had to avoid the steps and kind of slide down the outside of them instead.
I swear we were kissing the ground again when we got to the little road next to some pretty waterfalls and saw some fairly unfit-looking people strolling along. This gave us hope that maybe this was a flat road now down to the lake.
The Lake is beautiful and well worth the trouble in the end. We treated ourselves to some vin chaud (mulled wine) to steady the nerves. I was starving so I asked Nicky if she would get some peanuts - thinking energy food here. I was imagining a nice bowlful which would just about give me enough of a boost to be able to use my legs again. What we got was about a dozen sad looking peanuts swimming desolately on a rainy plate no bigger than a coaster. Great.
Not sure what we did in the evening, vaguely remember being in the Coyote bar at some point.
Elsie
