On mont blanc hike day 9 Auberge La Boerne at 08:00 am after breakfast and we were greeted with an amazing morning. The weather forecast for the day was for 35 degrees so we loaded up on lots of water and suncream. Our guidebook describes 2 options for today’s hike, the main route passes over vertical cliff edges using ladders and chains and the other option is a lower route that bypasses all the climbing. We decided on the higher route with the ladders and all the fun stuff, plus we get to see Lac Blanc.
We walked back up the hill out of Tré le Champ toward the main road, we crossed the main road and followed the signs for TMB into the woodland trail.
This section cuts through a lightly wooded forest that doesn’t add much protection from the sun but it does allow you to catch a glimpse of the valley below while climbing from Tré le Champ at 1417m to Lac Blanc at 2352m. After the woodland, the landscape becomes very bare but passing all the boulders and rock edges are really cool.
It took us 1 hour 20 minutes to reach the rocky base of Aiguillette d’Argentiere at 1893m from Tré le Champ. From here we get our first sight of the ladders used to climb the rock edges. Understandably Georgina is not used to climbing ladders or rock climbing and she was very nervous about the ladders. To make her even more nervous we met 2 older female walkers walking backwards from the ladders due to their fear of climbing them. They turned around to take the lower route to bypass the ladders and were very upset by it all.
The steel ladders are in very good condition they were well secured and in good positions so we didn’t need to overextend to climb them. The ladders generally consisted of climbing up 10-20 steps then scrambling between rocks to another set of ladders. There is a very steep fall in sections if you were to lose your balance, Georgina is very proud to have completed this section.
The ladders, railings, chains and steps continued the whole way to Lac Blanc but became less frequent after the below signpost for Lac Blanc. In the below picture you can see the path in the distance that we just walk to get to this point.
From the signposts toward Lac Blanc, the trail was not as steep and only raised gradually to pass Les Lacs des Chesery. This section of the TMB is filled is amazing views of the valley below and Mont Blanc.
It took us 2 hours 20 minutes to reach Les Lacs des Chesery from the Tré le Champ. We still had some ladder sections and steep stepped sections ahead of us but nothing like the initial ladders. The first sight of Lac Blanc we saw was the hostel’s toilet building on the top edge of the mountain.
From our first sight of seeing the Lac Banc hostel, it took us 20 minutes to reach the lake. It took us around 2 hours 45 minutes to reach the lake.
We reached the Refuge at Lac Blanc at 10:45 am but the hostel didn’t serve food until 11 am so we put in our order for some brunch and went for a stroll. You can always justify more food after climbing 935m in under 3 hours.
While waiting for our brunch to be cooked we went walking around Lac Blanc and in our opinion, this had the best views of the whole of the Tour du Mont Blanc hike. The coin in Georgina’s hand is our wedding coin as this is our pre-honeymoon holiday, Georgians goal was to try to take a picture of the wedding coin in all our major sights over the next 30 days hiking.
Our guidebook recommends walking to La Flegere to stay the night but this would mean that we would be finished walking around 1 pm. We felt that we should try to push further as we wanted to reach the train to Paris the next day before 1:32 pm in Les Houches. Our goal was to try to get to La Brevent or as close as possible or we would miss our train. We followed signs for the mountain signposts for PlanPraz, we walked over the bridge at Lac Blanc and continued to climb up the mountain, we could see everyone else descending the mountain below us to La Flegere.
The trail was reasonably easy, we cut across the top edge of the mountain and we didn’t lose much altitude. As this section of the mont blanc hike is not on the TMB we didn’t meet many people only a small few day hikers, that seemed to be hiking L’index trail. We walked for 1 hour and 15 minutes from Lac Blanc until we walked underneath a cable car line.
We then descended down into the edge of a valley below but we then rapidly started climbing up the edge of the mountain toward Col de la Gliere at 2461m. On the way to the top of the col we had to use wire ropes and ladders again but at this stage of the day, Georgina was taking it all in her stride and all the nerves had disappeared.
We reached the top of Col de la Gliere at 2461m in 2 hours 30 minutes from Lac Blanc, we then walked between two cols cresting over the ridge of the mountains to Col Cornu at 2406m, this took us 30 minutes. This section of the trail is simply stunning but it was extremely hot when we were here and there was no shelter from the sun.
After reaching Col Cornu we could see straight down the other side of the valley we could even see the cable car station at Plan Praz, we hoped to reach before 5 pm as they close it then. We left Col Cornu walking downhill at 15:20 the trail was very wide with good firm ground conditions, it zig-zagged down very steeply.
The quick descent suited us as we were running out of time but our legs were starting to get very tired. The temperature had now reached 40 degrees up on the mountain so we were happy to get down to resupplies at this stage. We reached the cable car station of Plan Praz at 16:10 so it only took us 50 minutes to descend the mountain of the mont blanc hike.
We decided to stay in Chamonix for the night and get a cable car back up to Brevent to finish off the TMB last stage. We stayed in a budget hotel that we booked on the internet for €50 each. We got our return cable car tickets from Plan Praz.
Every section of today’s stages of the Tour du Mont Blanc hike is filled with outstanding views and thrilling stages that will get the adrenaline pumping and maybe even question, what are you doing? But when you reach the top of every Col, or Lake that will all disappear and you soon forget about the high ladders and cliff edges. We extended our walk from Tré le Champ via Lac Blanc, via Col de la Gliere, via Col Cornu to Plan Praz. The additional Cols and walking were fully signposted and no harder than any other walk on the TMB but it was filled with much more views than any other day that we have done.