Completed our First Stage

 This will be a short post because we have had a long day! We hiked 11 hours and walked 35,196 steps! My knees on the long descent hurt a lot, but trusting that it will get better like last time. Here's a shot outside our  inn where we were waiting for the bus to take us to the trail head.

  At the start of the trail — we knew we had a long day ahead of us.

  There were a couple of sections this morning where they had cable on the rock to help you up the rocky trail.

  We went over a swinging bridge over a rushing river coming off the glacier.

  We made it to Col de Voza in about 2 hours — we were pleased with our time in the morning. Since it was such a beautiful day and we still felt pretty good, we decided to "go for it" and take the higher route. We knew this route would add time, elevation gain/loss, and be more strenuous. However, we didn't know when we might come back to Mont Blanc, so we decided to take the chance and see the spectacular views with the glaciers. 

We had lunch overlooking this beautiful scene — great view of Mont Blanc (we think) and one of the many glaciers.

  Lunch was a welcome break — we were only part of the way up to the 2nd col, Col de Tricot.

  We made it to Col de Tricot at about 3 pm. There were sheep everywhere.

  Very excited to not be going up hill anymore (so we thought :-)

 The downhill feels like a welcome relief at first but with 3 hours of very steep downhill with lots of switchbacks, I, in particular, was hurting at the end of our hike. We also got a surprise section of more uphill about 2 hours before we finished hike — it was another 40 minutes of a very steep climb before the final descent into the little town we are staying at. 

We arrived at our inn, washed out some clothes and then went down to eat. I could have skipped eating and just climbed into bed, but we have a very long day of hiking tomorrow, so Greg said we need to eat and fuel our bodies. 

We're staying in a hut tomorrow night so guessing we won't have Internet. Look for another report in a couple of days.