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We set off to try and repeat our Flaine circuit from last week. It was quite a big ask. I mentioned that we were pushing the boundaries of what was “guidable” in the earlier post. Everything went perfectly last time, this time quite a number of things conspired against the trip. Although the weather started off as 100% blue skies our first spot of trouble was the fact that the Pleney lift was temporarily out of order. This meant we did not reach the top of the lift until 10am, we skipped coffee and missed off the Bourgeois to save time. We carried on down route 50 which was great but a little slippy in places, this caused one of the group to have a fairly heavy fall, this took a little time to recover from.

We carried on down and raced through Samoens (which caused us to miss our intended trip into  the Supermarket)  and just managed to get on the lift up to Samoens 1600m before it closed. We took the newly renovated track to Les Esserts, a great little route (if a little boggy in places) that took us almost an hour. We arrived at Les Esserts at 1.30pm and needed some lunch! By the time we started up the lifts again it was clear that 1. We didn’t have enough time to do the whole Flaine circuit 2. The weather was definitely on the turn 3. I checked again if the DMC was open (important, because if you arrive in Flaine and the lift is closed extricating yourself from there is quite tricky) and it wasn’t.  Any one of those points were sufficient to make us to turn back.

We descended (1000m) to the valley floor and hammered along the river trail to try and get another descent on the GME before it closed at 4.30pm. We arrived at 4.20pm and it was closed. What can you do?

Coffee and cake (thanks guys) in Samoens was a highlight of the day for me. I hoped we could do an uplift and finish the day off along the Nyon traverse. Too bad the weather finally closed in to deliver torrential rain. At this point I was v.very glad we had not pushed on, by my calculations we would have been in the worst possible place in the worst possible weather!

les esserts

For more information on Samoens check out this Victorian resident, Alfred Wills. And the book he wrote about the region “Wanderings among the high Alps“.