Introduction

Well, this trip has certainly crept up on me!  Lise arrives tomorrow from Oregon, and we fly out to Geneva on Monday.  No packing done yet, and a ton of loose ends to clean up around here.  Oh well......

The Tour du Mont Blanc, or TMB, is a 170 km hike around the Mont Blanc massif that we will complete over 11 days of walking.  We'll start and finish in Les Houches, France.  We will be walking in three countries - France, Italy, and Switzerland, and travelling in a counter-clockwise direction.  The summit of Mont Blanc is the highest point in Europe west of the Caucasus, at an elevation of 4808 metres.  I've engaged the services of Macs Adventure to do all the reservations and (best of all!) they will move our luggage from hotel to hotel (with the exception of one night that we'll stay in a mountain hut).  It won't be an easy stroll, though, as we'll gain and lose about 10,000 metres of elevation over those 11 days.  Lise, a biking friend from Oregon, will be travelling with me.  Gary (from Vernon) and Pat (from Canmore) are with us on a separate reservation so we won't always be staying in exactly the same place.  They're all faster than me, but hopefully we'll find a pace that works for all - or at least meet up at the end of the day.   

Some snippets from the guidebook:  Mont Blanc, the Monarch of the Alps, rises 3700m above the valleys, more than Everest reaches above Base Camp.  Mont Blanc's 4808m snow-covered dome is seen throughout the trek, with glistening sunrises and rosy sunsets.  It floats above the range, seemingly benign but a big and complex mountain.  The Mont Blanc massif holds 40 major mountains and as many glaciers, with eleven 4000m peaks.  Chamonix, at the foot of the mountain, is one of the world's centres of mountaineering.  The route takes in 11 high passes around Mont Blanc, walkers' passes but requiring 1000m of climbing per day.  Some are gentle, some sharp, and most are remote, usually with some of the best views of the massif.  Along the way the route passes through Mont Blanc's seven surrounding valleys of very different character:  the hustle and bustle of Arve (Chamonix's valley), the wild and protected Montjoie valley, the secluded Vallee des Glaciers, the pastoral Swiss Val Ferret and narrow Vallee du Trient, and the Italian Val Veny and Val Ferret, with the immense rocks of Monte Bianco and the Grandes Jorasses rising above.  Wooden chalets and grazing cattle speak of the unchanging lives of the people of the valleys.  

Macs has provided a guidebook and some paper maps as well as a phone app.  Hopefully that will be enough to guide us each day.  

We fly in to Geneva and then transfer by van to Les Houches (near Chamonix) where we'll spend a few days getting used to the new time zone and looking around a bit.  There are some cableway and train excursions to do from there, but right now the weather for those 3 days doesn't look great so we may defer them until after our hike.  

Time to go and make some head-way on my to-do list............