Recently our local newspaper advertised their magazines on hiking and biking trails in our department and the neighboring ones. I bought two issues that cover Isère, Drôme, Ardeche, Vaucluse, Savoie, Haute-Savoie, Hautes-Alpes, and Alpes-de-Haute-Provence (not so neighboring one, though). The information covered about the trails includes a short description of the hike/bike ride, its length, suggested time, level of difficulty (actually, the level of hikers/bikers), meters of ascent, and a QR code for downloading the GPX coordinates. I think there are quite enough hikes and rides for rest of our lives!

Yesterday we started with an easy one (given that we had a long run planned for today) that started in Corbel (850m), a little village deep in the Northern part of the Chartreuse range. We had never been in this area before, and in order to get there we took an unfamiliar road over the Col du Granier (1134m). We were a bit worried about the weather since it was quite cloudy here in the Grésivaudan valley when we left, but the clouds almost cleared when we entered Savoie department, but of course it was again quite cloudy in the mountains. Only towards the end of our short hike (7K in 2h, D+/D- 250m, although my Polar watch indicated more like 400m) the sun came out.

The hiking route had been planned to visit several famous water fountains cut in stone that have been historically very important for the livelihood of Corbel; running water came relatively late to this village located in a delicate mountainous area. The fountains were completely renovated in 1999.