TMB Day Seven: La Fouly to Champex *The Tour du Mont Blanc is the most famous and celebrated hike in Alpine Europe and is the fifth Bucket List Hike that Brian and Sylvia have completed together. It is also our first hike together of any kind in Europe.* There aren’t many good things to say about getting a poor night’s […]
Tour du Mont Blanc: No Easy Mile
TMB Day Six: Rifugio Bonati to La Fouly We had a fairly restful night at the Bonati. Though it was a shared room, three of the seven beds were entirely empty, and one gentleman sleeping by the window, reading a book most of the time, said not a word the whole time. (Well he said six, actually…”Mind if I open […]
Tour du Mont Blanc: The Hard Button
TMB Day 4: Rifugio Elisabetta to Courmayeur *The Tour du Mont Blanc is the most famous and celebrated hike in Alpine Europe and is the fifth Bucket List Hike that Brian and Sylvia have completed together. It is also our first hike together of any kind in Europe.* After a very satisfying breakfast we said goodbye to the friends we […]
Tour du Mont Blanc: And We’re Just Getting Started(?!)
TMB Day Two: Refuge de Truc to Refuge du Bonhomme *The Tour du Mont Blanc is the most famous and celebrated hike in Alpine Europe and is the fifth Bucket List Hike that Brian and Sylvia have completed together. It is also our first hike together of any kind in Europe.* Day two got off to a gray and drizzly […]
Tour du Mont Blanc: À la montagne, monsieur le chef de train!
TMB: A Travel Lesson It is ironic that the longest single part of the voyage – the 4,035 mile transatlantic flight to Paris – was also the most uneventful, even quite scenic…including my first glimpse of Ireland, lying green, resplendent and out of reach just thirty thousand feet below. It seemed the closer we got to our destination the more […]
Tour du Mont Blanc: Oops, Mind the First Step!
Planning for the TMB Before we could hike the Tour du Mont Blanc, we had to get there, ‘there’ being the alpine hinterlands where France, Italy and Switzerland come together in a knife’s edge rampart of high granite. Events would show this to be no easy thing in itself. The TMB begins in the popular ski resort city of Chamonix, […]
Sent To The Big House (Mountain)
Big House Mountain, VA *We have added the Big House Mountain hike in House Mountain Preserve to our list of the Best Hikes in the Southern Appalachians. It is a REALLY interesting hike in west-central Virginia. Note that there are several options to this hike and the one we ended up hiking was…somewhat on the creative side. There are easier […]
The Cold Equations
The Standing Indian Loop: Preparations and Decisions Gen. Dwight Eisenhower once said that before a battle, preparations are everything; but once a battle is joined, preparations mean nothing. So it goes with hiking. Good preparation is absolutely essential for a multi-day hike, and most hikes that fail do so because the hiker was poorly prepared. But the trick is knowing […]