Tuesday April 10th - La Croix du Nivolet

Well I am not entirely sure where to begin to bring this blog up to date, because I have so many events to catch up on... Therefore I will do a separate post for each "event" and I will, as usual, use photos to tell my stories.

My mom arrived Tuesday April 10th, and though she was scheduled to arrive at 10:15, she didn't get in until about 30 minutes after that because of a train delay. This was a harbinger for some of our travel luck to come, though this delay really did not cause any issues because the only item on the agenda was our hike to the Croix du Nivolet (the Nivolet Cross). So we met up with David after his civilization class, picked up lunch at a local kebab shop (French kebabs are nothing like anything we have in America, though I do find them quite good, they are not my favorite food. they are, however, quick and decently cheap). We then hopped on the bus that was going to drop us off at that starting point for our hike, and we set off.

We arrived and then ate our lunch, officially hitting the trails at about 1:22, a little bit after what we originally planned, but with the buffer we had built in we were not worried. We hiked a very steep path for about an hour and a half to reach Lovettaz, a small town from which David and I's hike book had the hike officially start.

This is a photo of the three of us as we entered the small town. Notice that we still had smiles on our faces. That is because we were yet to complete exhaust ourselves with way too much walking...

The signage in the town pointing to the various trails and sights. We went to the Doria waterfall and obviously La Croix du Nivolet.

So we were on track and continued hiking for about 45 minutes to reach the Doria waterfall, which was quite gorgeous. Here is a picture of my by the waterfall:

After Doria, we were back on the trail, hiking for another hour and a half before finally reaching the cross. It was an extremely exhausting and difficult hike (not something that we would have purposefully decided on for our hike with mom had we known how strenuous it would be) which absolutely never stopped steeply climbing upward. In all, we gained about 4800 feet in elevation during the climb, and our hamstrings and calves were incredibly sore and tired for the second half, and particularly the last 1/4th of the climb, which even included scaling a rocky wall/path (with the help of a built-in cord) and climbing a series of rungs built into some boulders to access the plateau with the cross. We did, however, successfully arrive at our destination...

I haven't edited this photo yet, but there is a cross on that mountaintop behind us. Obviously at this point of our hike we were very near our destination, but we were also quite exhausted and we still had some very exciting challenges to come.

Here is the rock "wall" we had to climb with the help of the metal cord. I personally really enjoyed this part of the hike, though I was the only one. I guess it was good that I had the camera since I was the only one willing to take a hand off to take some pictures.

Here is the built-in "ladder" that we also had to climb.

Me climbing the ladder. I sent David up first so that he could get a picture of me. Mom followed me up so that I could give her a hand whenever needed.

Almost at the cross, this is the view back over Chambéry and the valley

Success!! David and I at the cross. If I may say so myself, this cross isn't too lovely up close, though the views were spectacular. However, as you can see the approaching storm did take away from some of the beauty.

This is the view of Chambéry that I took from the cross. Believe it or not we double-checked the forecast before leaving and it said that it wasn't going to rain.... I think they might have been wrong.

Within ten minutes we were in the heart of the storm, which caused us two very big problems: 1) We lost time because we took shelter from the rain for about half an hour so that we could let the worst of it pass and avoid getting soaking wet, and 2) we were prevented from returning to our planned bus stop because the weather made the access to our cliff-faced ladder rather perilous and we decided it wasn't worth any of our lives to try to take that path back. Therefore we had to walk away from Chambéry, down the plateau, in order to get to another small town from where we could descend the mountain and begin our trek back.

Once the weather cleared up we did get a pretty view back towards our mountain, but we were still a very long way from home. By now it was about 6:10, and the last bus from Pragondran (which is more or less outside the frame of this picture but close to the point below the clearing in the very bottom right-hand side of this picture) left at 7:00. When we made the decision to return by the alternate unknown route we were fairly certain that we wouldn't make the bus, but we weren't really sure what other alternative we would find.

By 6:20 we had found the path that lead to Pragondran and down the mountainside, but it had a time estimate of 2 hours and 40 minutes to get there. Without wasting time we set off, this time at a steep descent, working out way back home. Amazingly, we would arrive at Pragondran in 51 minutes (so I am not sure how in the world they make their time estimates for the signs) but that means that we arrived at 7:11, 11 minutes past the departure of the last bus.... 

We had already been walking for about 6 hours, with 4.5 hours of massively uphill paths, and 1.5 hours of extremely downhill slopes that hurt our knees, and now we were looking at another 2ish hours to return home. But we had no choice, so we kept walking, following the bus stops home, and every time a car drove by I attempted to hitch a ride for us. 5 cars drove by without stopping, so I was beginning to lose hope, but then a college-aged guy stopped and said that he would take us to Bessans, a town very near to Chambéry, since that is where he was going. Though we probably only spent about 5 minutes in the car, he was driving quite quickly and we all think that he probably saved us about an hour of walking, especially given how tired we were at that point. At Bessans, we got out of the car, and kept on walking...

We were so happy to reach Chambéry that I stopped to take a photo of the city limit sign when we arrived. Surprisingly we were all the way into the city center by 8:25pm and we were home by 8:40. In all, that means we walked heavily for about 7 and a half hours that day, with huge elevation change, and all three of us were walking like invalids for our remaining travel days in Marseille and Arles. 

I learned a valuable lesson that day: 1) Do not trust online hike blogs about the difficulty of a certain hike (most blogs had said that this hike was not too difficult, giving it and average rating) 2) Do not trust the weather report, because that rain cost us our planned route home which eventually lead to a longer hike, which lead to a missed bus... and 3) Never ever ever do a really big hike before you are about to go traveling and touring because you will regret your loss of mobility.

In the end though, several days later, I am glad that we made it to the Croix du Nivolet, one of the iconic symbols of Chambéry with my mother, and that we were able to safely return from that ill-fated hike. My muscles have all recovered, but I am nursing a sore knee that started acting up just yesterday and is causing me a fair amount of pain. I will let you know the prognosis as time continues though. It is a troubling pain because I never have problems with my knees, and it didn't hurt specifically during or in the two days after the hike, but it began hurting day 3 and has become quite a nuisance. But hopefully since I will be doing absolutely nothing active tomorrow it will use some relaxation to recover.