Saturday, August 27th, 2022

Today's route:

Roya (1458 m) - Col de Crousette (2480) - Stèle Vallette (2585 m) - Col des Moulinés (1977 m) - Pierre du Démant (1811 m) - Portes de Longon (1949 m) - Vacherie de Roure (1862 m)

In Gîte de Roya, a humorous middle-aged couple serves us, very hospitable, very communicative, very helpful, and sometimes they bicker good-naturedly like a married couple. There are few guests in the 23-bed Gîte. We are four hikers, one of whom, a fifty-year-old Walloon, has been on the road for fifteen months, not only hiking, as he tells us high up at 2500 meters, but he does not join us for dinner and breakfast. He seems to be a loner with autistic characteristics, we think. The other hiker is a likeable jeune homme from Lyon, a cyber specialist, who completes a distance that takes us two days in one day. He will soon find a job in Lausanne, which will not be a problem with his profession. The conversation with him is entertaining and open.

In hindsight, it turns out to be fortunate that we did not want or could not continue hiking yesterday because of the weather. It must have hailed violently at higher altitudes, even where we wanted to camp (at an altitude of 2200 meters). We find many spots with piles of hailstones, and the place where we spent the night is almost worse in this regard. The shepherd there tells us that the whole Longon Valley was white.

The weather forecast for today is bad (from noon) in itself, but it only starts raining around 5 pm, just as we begin to set up the tent. We are in a meadow with horses, cows, and donkeys. Because Ignaz is afraid that they will trample on our tent at night, he tries to chase them away as far as possible. They are not a problem during the night, when it rains heavily at times, but an uninvited guest.

Once again, the day is long, over twenty kilometers and a few meters of altitude (see route).