Another scorching weekend in Grenoble, another escape to the higher altitude, this time to Le Corbier (1550m) in Savoie department, where the daytime temperatures were forecast to be below +30C. I am not sure if it was true, but nights at least were cooler than in the town.
We rented a 1999 VW Lupo (with no working air-conditioning) which was not quite up to the task of climbing steep mountain roads, but it survived. We had a slight setback when we could not find any towels or bed linen in our airbnb apartment. I had checked several times in the listing that the host provided them — part of the reason I chose this particular apartment over the other ones that were available. I texted to the host and he responded that they provide pillows and blankets (and toilet paper and cleaning stuff etc. ) but no linens and towels. Then to my surprise I noticed that after my message he changed this information on his airbnb listing, and wrote back to him that I didn’t find that very nice.
Luckily we found some towels and a sheet wide enough to fit the bed in the nearby supermarket — we were particularly lucky since that sheet was the last one — but they cost us more than 50 euros, which was more than we paid for one night! I told him that too. He apologized several times for the mis-information/communication and offered us a free weekend at his place at some other time. We were happy to accept the offer, since we really liked the apartment and the hiking around Le Corbier. So, we will be back this coming weekend!
Next morning we tried to get up early and hit the trails before it got too hot. We managed to start at 8:30am., which is kind of late for us. We headed to La Toussuire (1705m), the next village/ski resort up the road. Inadvertently we chose a trail that started up, but then went down and up and down … From La Toussuire we continued a steep dirt road up to Tête de Bellard (2225m) from where we had a gorgeous view over the nearby mountains. We finished with a long downhill to Le Corbier on a steep and loose gravel trail winding among small trees we thought were alders. In 5 hours 23 minutes we walked 14.8 kilometers with ascent of 943 meters.
Sunday’s walk took us to a different direction south of Le Corbier, first to Le Col de la Chal (1800m) and then to Le Col d’Arves (1748m). We finished this hike on another steep forest trail that partly followed a bottom of a creek. This day in little more than 3 hours, we walked 8.64 kilometers with the ascent of 509 meters.
Instead of taking the highway back home we took a small mountain road that climbed over Le Col de la Croix de Fer (2067m), one of the iconic high mountain passes that has been featured in Le Tour de France nineteen times between 1947 and 2017. It was certainly scarier ride for the passenger than the driver since he simply did not have a chance to look around and enjoy the scenery.
