For several weeks now daytime temperatures in Grenoble and Gresivaudan valley have climbed between +30 and +40 degrees of Celsius. Fortunately the nights and mornings have still been cool, but it is all changing now; the nights are warmer and the days even hotter.

This past weekend (July 27-29) we escaped the long heatwave to Chamrousse, where we also spent a weekend back in 2015 in similar circumstances. However, the opportunity of cooler air on the mountains comes with the risk of averse weather conditions, and this time we knew that there will be rain and thunder on Saturday. Therefore we skipped the hike and went for a late morning run. We didn’t have a very good plan, and ended up running whatever trails we found. At some point it started raining quite heavily. Eventually we found ourselves at Plateau de l’Arselle, where we were skiing just three months earlier. With horses and the peat bog it looked quite different now. When we were back in the ski resort the fog rolled over us.

The weather forecast for Sunday looked awesome, so in order to fully enjoy the cool air and the mountains before our early afternoon bus back to the town, we woke up at 5:30am. and it wasn’t even 7:30am. yet when we were out for a five-hour hike.

We started with a 3-kilometer climb to La Croix de Chamrousse (2250m), the cable car station and a weather station that we can see from our home. From there we took a tricky trail down to Lacs Robert for an idyllic lunch.

Until Lacs Robert we hardly saw anyone, but on our way down via Lac Achard, the trail became really crowded. Really crowded. And it also got a lot warmer. We were so happy we started early.