CROWDED MORNING LEAVING TRIENTE

August 16, 2026

VIA ALPINA DAY 55 – SATURDAY 15 AUGUST 2026

TRIENTE –> BOURG -SAINT-PIERRE

DISTANCE HIKED: 34.15 km
ELEVATION GAIN: 1,810 m

TOTAL DISTANCE HIKED: 1,408.28 km
TOTAL ELEVATION GAIN: 73,436 m

What an experience sharing a campsite with around 200 people and only two toilets. The whole campsite seemed under-resourced. We tried to charge our powerbank last night, but there were 30 USB points running off one power point, so nobody was getting much charge. It was raining and felt a bit chaotic. The rain certainly calmed everything down, though, and we had a reasonable night’s rest. It seems that almost everyone at the campsite was on the Tour de Mont Blanc trail.

We left the campsite just as it started to get light. It was a nice, easy ascent out of Trient and the trail was beautifully made. We saw nobody until we reached the top of the climb, when a group of hikers passed us going in the opposite direction.

Until Champex-Lac, we shared the trail with Tour du Mont Blanc hikers, all heading in the opposite direction. On the steep, rocky descent, over a couple of hours, we passed around 300 TMB hikers. The sheer number and variety of hikers was quite extraordinary.

The trail in our direction seemed never-ending, long after the steady flow of TMB hikers had stopped.

We eventually made it into Champex-Lac and stopped at the campground on the edge of town. I got a coffee, Hammer had a Coke, and, best of all, in our short stop here we were able to charge the powerbank to 40% from a proper power point. Such a relief!

From there, the town was full of hikers and, being a weekend, the restaurants were buzzing. The lake looked so inviting, but we still had another 15 km to go to reach Bourg-Saint-Pierre.

From the lake, our trail separated from the TMB and Hammer and I had a quiet descent to Orsières. The afternoon heat became oppressive as we dropped into the valley. Then, in the blazing afternoon sun, we headed back up towards Bourg-Saint-Pierre.

The mountains seemed smaller here. There wasn’t anything towering over you in quite the same way, although we could still see a small glacier nestled into one of them. All afternoon we were hiking below a freeway, so the constant noise of traffic became our companion.

As we got closer to our destination, we crossed a bridge over a fast-running glacial meltwater river. The volume and speed of the water were quite wild.