Haute Route Day 2 - Trient to Champex

As I write this, it's the morning of day 6. I'm in a nice little hotel in Arolla, with the scarce luxuries of fast wifi, access to a laptop, a clean body, and a tiny bit of time before breakfast then hiking. It's been an amazing trip so far.. and I'm not sure I can even remember day 2 at this point. But, let's try... fortunately, I took a lot of photos.

Before leaving the auberge in Trient, I took a quick shot of the 'dorm' room. This one held 8 people. We know something like this is in our near future in the alpine huts which will be one of the new experiences for all of us on this hike.

There's not much in Trient; this church is the highlight. We walked past it on our way up and out of town.

Fresh and clean as the climb begins.

At the base of the real climb into the high valley, we passed a short suspension bridge, which we didn't have to cross, but went out onto for the views up the stream.

About 30 minutes into the climb, we caught up with a group of hikers we recognized from Zermatt and Trient. This is a group of about ten hikers with a guide from 'Cloud 9'. They were a very friendly bunch of folks, saying 'hi' in recognition as we passed them.

Shortly after passing them, Brian said, "lesson number two: don't go on a guided tour."

(I don't remember what lesson number one was. Something about the dorm?) And yes... we had been considering doing this hike guided when we signed up, and as Brian said, that, I was just thinking I was really glad we'd chosen not to do that. We can move at our own pace, not the slowest pace of the others who signed up.. and we have all the routes and other details, so this self-guided approach seems to be working well for us so far. (Although their guide was very cool and I have to say, looking back at this from day 6, we've benefited some from his knowledge of the trails just from chats over dinner.)

Just another photo showing "going up steep stuff surrounded by beauty." Imagine this for two to three hours straight...

Mark taking a breather as the Trient Glacier at the top of the climb comes into clear view.

Said glacier. Gorgeous and magnificent. And sadly, quickly shrinking.

The top of the pass. If you look verrrrrrry closely, you can see Mark and Brian eating lunch. (I think the full resolution of this photo is going on my wall.)

Both sides of the climb were scree fields.

Part of the reality of hiking out here on well-known trails is that you sometimes pass large groups going the other way, often at the most inopportune times. Here's a large, loud group going up to the summit we just left. We got off the trail to just let them pass.

Several hours of descent later, we arrived in Champex le Lac, a very pretty little town that has an amazing set of trails around it with waterfalls and managed water passages.

From here, it was a quick stroll through town to find our hotel for the evening, where we would spend time cleaning up, trying to upload photos and such, and then prepping for the the next segment of the hike.

See Also

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Haute Route Retrospective

Haute Route Epilogue - A Full Perspective