Two joint themes-of-the-day: cross-training & dehydration. Well, three themes actually. Of which more later. Today would be a sally up to the top of La Blanche, a neighbouring mountain whose rather splendid cairn at the top boasts 9650 ft.
By now you will have gathered that this was to be done on foot, hence the cross-training. We two had done something similar during the cyclojaunt to Girona in 2011, where Ulli took us up a benign (his word, and it wasn't!) Pyrenee. Now, as then, we took the car to the starting-point at 4600 and set off up this thing. The sign at the start suggested a 4-hour ascent. We made it in a little over 3. Time to feel smug and partake of a ham sandwich and a few Marks & Spencer bite-size flapjacks.
The views all around were absolutely stupendous. The skies were clear and blue, and every single peak in the 360-degree vista, as far away as Mont Blanc and Italy's Monte Viso, was pin-sharp. Amazingly quiet, too; we had seen only five people (3 already coming down and 2 sharing the cairn with us), a herd of goats and two marmots since exiting the car. The goats' bells had been the only sound, apart from the distant rush of the river thousands of feet below. But all good things must come to an end....
Back in the day, at the Pyrenee, we had all jumped on the tourist train to get us back down to the car park. Thus we had no idea what was in store for folks descending this sort of stuff on foot. Either the steep pathways were strewn with small stones about as stable as a gross of marbles or every rock decided to slide downwards the moment one's foot alighted on it. Add to this, if you will, complication i) that Alan had clearly not drunk enough during the ascent and was beginning to do a pretty good impression of Bambi on acid. Dehydration. And complication ii) that Forest's knee was giving severe gyp. (Theme 3 of the day - Forest's knee) Both our minds were fixed upon the unavoidable truth: we were really here to ride our bikes, and one unguarded moment here on this mountain could put an end to all that. Survival instinct kicked in.
It almost certainly took us as long to descend as it had taken to ascend, such was the caution on show, but descend we did, and Alan even became sufficiently compos mentis again to drive back down the mountain to Vallouise. Just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill kinda day.
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