One last post to wrap things up on our hike in Chamonix France along the Southern Balcony trail.
We left the moutaintop restaurant - Altitude 2000 and headed back along the same path that we came from.
This hike wasn't a circuit but more of a there and back again type of thing. They tend to be a little more boring because you end up seeing a lot of the same scenery thanks for that captain obvious. In our case though that was only up to the half way point.
The one positive about taking the wrong route in the begining was that the way back on the correct trail was basically all new to us. So the 2nd half of the journey was essentially a circuit.
The photo above and below is the Charlanon landscape with Mont Blanc in the background.
La Charlanon was the halfway point. It was this grassy mountain field with these massively large boulders scattered throughout it. It was pretty cool.
If you have been following my blog for a while you may remember that I seriously hurt my knee during a hiking trip in the Pyrenees in June of 2022.
That was only about 3-4 weeks prior to this trip so it hadn't fully healed by this point.
It started to hurt quite a bit when we were getting close to the restaurant that day and now that we were heading back I was limping and getting really quite worried.
View of Chamonix
Wide angle below
My sister offered to take the backpack I was carrying with our water and jackets and odds and ends and that actually helped a great deal.
It was a game changer actually. Not quite as light as a feather but pretty damn close.
Something sort of funny was that she mentioned being happy that we were moving slower now because she found the first part of the hike to be very tiring.
She jogs regularly and is in really good shape but hiking at higher altitudes and walking uphill continuously for long periods of time is very different than jogging on flat terrain.
I think that she thought it would be much easier than it was.
She did amazing though.
Looking at Mont Blanc
I hadn't known that she was tired at all before she mentioned it because she had been keeping pace with me the entire time.
The face of pure joy.
She is a trooper for sure. She went non-stop with no complaints that day.
I was probably bitching about my knee for the back half of the hike, enough for both of us.
These days my knee is actually doing fairly well.
We don't do much hiking or walking in Canada so I haven't pushed it or anything, but it doesn't hurt daily anymore like it did for months after the initial injury. So thats all very positive.
By this point we were getting close to the end of the hike. The trail begins at the cable car station that is located beside another one that brings you down to the town of Flégère.
Looking back the way we came you can see Chamonix in the distance. It was getting late in the afternoon and that was where we were headed, to our Airbnb to unpack and then off to dinner. But that is a story for another time.