According to my GPS we’ve completed 76 miles of the Haute Route. Today we climbed about 4000 feet and descended almost 4,500 in a little over 11 miles. We are averaging just under 11 miles per day which doesn’t sound like much until you take elevation gain and loss each day. Every day but the first included a pass to go over, and some days we went over two or three.

Here’s Stanna completing today’s pass, Col du Torrent. We seem to have dropped many of the hikers today because we jumped over a normal stopping point on account of our trip being 12 days and others are doing 14- and 15-day tours. The only through hiker we saw today was coming the opposite direction as he was trying to combine two days into one, and we saw him late in the afternoon. Since it was Sunday we did see a number of day hikers as we got closer to the lake on our descent, but other than that it was pretty much just us on the trail.

We have seen quite a number of high Alpine Lakes, many of which have hydroelectric dams. Considering the number we’ve seen, Switzerland must export electricity. Most of the lakes that we have seen have been runoffs from the various glaciers and are milky white in color. Yesterday’s lake and dam was said to be the largest producer of hydroelectric power in Switzerland. The lake we saw today was azure blue or turquoise in color and was very different considering it’s size.

One of the towns we passed through, or I should say village, had quite a collection of vintage wooden houses. Every one was in fully restored condition and I’m sure that McKenney would be absolutely fascinated by the carpentry techniques used. It’s easy to tell the granaries as they all have large flat round stones between the foundation and the floor joists in order to keep varmints from getting up into the wooden grain storage houses. We’re still trying to figure out why some houses are half stone and half wooden. And by half-and-half I mean a four-story house might be built four stories of stone right next to four stories of timber and all connected with the same roof. We’re wondering whether or not many of them are now second homes, as Stanna said maybe they were always second homes when they had a summer house with the cows further up the mountains.
Today the weather came in and we started our hike in low clouds or fog when we were in the low lands. Real quickly we got up above those clouds and could look down on them, but it wasn’t long before they started rising with the heat and we were hiking in fog for about half a day. Fortunately we beat the rain, arriving at our destination just as the rain started.