You can see the peak of La Blanche, from the terrace outside our front door, where I’m writing this, so thought we ought to try and climb it. Rather helpfully, the nearby chairlift gives a good head start and for 13 euros this time, we got quickly wisked up to 2200m. We had initially planned to climb a long rock route, but having got kit ready the night before, and set a 06:30 alarm, awoke to find it raining! The clouds seemed to be breaking up around 09:00 when we re-surfaced, so decided to use the lift to expedite progress! Soon after breakfast, we were surreally, striding out through the high meadows…

The path up from the top lift was easy enough to follow and the clouds swirled in and out, revealing then concealing the view.

Higher up, the meadows gave way to rocky limestone terrain and a little bit of scrambling to reach the summit ridge.

As the clouds broke up, the views were sensational. Below, I could see Ailefroide and the Sele Valley that I’d hike up the week before.

Having got up there, we decided to hang out as long as possible as the views were so good and the weather slowly improving. We had plenty of jackets and food, so settled in for a long lunch. After which we even had a nap in the emergency shelter that I had in my pack.

There’s a huge cairn on the summit, so we thought we ought get a photo by it before we began our descent.

There was just time to de-tour to visit the Lac de Puy Aillard (at 2534m), but to get there we had to negotiate a lot of goats!

The lake was very tranquil and almost tempted us for a swim…

We had to get back to the top lift before 16:00 and didn’t want to miss the last lift and have to walk home, so retraced our steps, past the goats and down to the lift.

We were both pretty tired by the time we got there and happily let the lift take the strain and we slowly floated down into the warmth of the lower valley.

I’ve marked our house on the photo below – you can even just make out the car parked in front of it too!

The easy way down…

The last leg, through the village felt exhausting. We bought a few treats from the bakery on the way and couldn’t get our hot shoes off fast enough on arrival at the front door! Brews in hand, we soon collapsed onto the sofa, where shortly after we both fell asleep! An unplanned 800m ascent day! We were tired…