Julie Hernandez was spending the summer near Chamonix in France, training for her trip to Nepal several months later. When she couldn’t extent her rental for an extra week, she instead found an Airbnb apartment in Tignes, France, which had a special place in her heart. Her family had spent countless summer and winter vacations in this village nestled in the Alps. Julie had taught toddlers to ski at the local ski school, then graduated to the winter mountain rescue team where she honed her mountaineering skills in high school. She also cleaned rooms and tended bar at one of the local hotels. Twenty years later, the town has exploded in size, and Club Med was building a 500-room hotel on one of the last available spaces. As much as the town of Tignes had expanded, the surrounding mountain ranges had lost none of their majestic grandeur.
I would only be in France for five days, including the two of train/bus travel between Paris and Tignes. I arrived in Paris from Boston, having gotten two hours of sleep on the transatlantic flight. From Paris, the 7-hour itinerary included two train rides, a bus, and a final one-hour taxi ride up the twisting mountain road to Tignes. I thanked my lucky stars for knowing enough French to help me navigate from Halle 1 to Porte 3 in the Gare de Lyons in my sleep-deprived state.
The weather forecast was abysmal: rain all three days that we’d have available to hike. We resigned ourselves to a first day of catching up on work, reminding ourselves that we did both have full-time jobs. But we managed a quick look-see to the village center some 30 minutes by foot from the apartment.
The second day promised a few hours of clear weather in the morning, which we grabbed. When Julie asked if I wanted the moderate or strenuous hike, I wimped out in favor of moderate. She then guided us to the Aiguille Percée (threading the needle) on a ridge overlooking Tignes. This unusual structure consists of a ring of solid rock perched on the ridge, with a sharp drop-off on both sides. Julie could remember the days when this spot was a favorite for advertisers: skiers could be seen sailing through the circle onto the slope of powdered snow below, touting the benefits of local ski shops and regional liquors. She remembered the family photo where she and her two brothers dangled atop this iconic structure. With time, the rock has eroded, and it is now illegal to climb to the top.
I learned on this trip that this range of mountains allows the hiker to choose between la montagne à vaches (meandering through cow pastures) or la haute montagne (scrambling up rugged terrain, often at higher altitude). I happily opted for the less demanding, which nonetheless offered hour after hour of stunningly beautiful panoramas. In the distance were patches of the glacier that had covered the mountainside of the Grande Motte during Julie’s childhood. Global warming was taking its toll.
Over the course of the days in Tignes, Julie provided a nonstop account of family adventures and memorable moments. From our 5th floor window, she saw a woman leading her son on a pony. Julie recounted an incident when her mother was doing the same with her younger brother, but the pony just wouldn’t budge. She finally clapped her hands loudly, and the pony took off on a gallop, causing great alarm among the bystanders. (The brother survived but wasn’t see on a horse again for some 20 years later.) We also heard about her mother’s consideration for the next renters, wanting to leave their apartments as clean or cleaner than they’d been at the start. When Julie was in her mid-teens, on the final day of their rental, her mother had left a plastic bottle on the counter marked Evian (water). Unbeknownst to Julie, it contained bleach. Thirsty from her ski run, she grabbed the bottle and took a big swig of it, to everyone’s horror. Before carting her off to the emergency health service, her mother gave her some whiskey to counter the taste of the bleach. Julie then found herself face to face with the local doctor, trying to explain why as a 15-year-old, she had whiskey on her breathe at 10 am, all while recounting some cockamamie story of drinking bleach.
The meteorologists had been wrong, and Day 3 proved to be picture perfect: clear skies, warm weather. We headed up the opposite mountainside as the previous day. We soon discovered that a local mountain bike competition was underway, and that we risked being on the path as they cruised over ridges at dizzying speeds. Perhaps because it was the final weekend of the season in Tignes, the crowds were sparse. The only mountain bikers we encountered were at a safe distance.
Julie had selected a route that would take us to the top of the ridge overlooking Tignes, then wander back through a neighboring town of Val d’Isère and eventually past the lake I’d crossed in the taxi ride up to Tignes. The water was an electrifying turquoise,
almost too brilliant to be the real thing. The final mile back to Tignes required a climb through the woods, then onto a steep gravel road. By now it was Hour 5 of the hike, and I was panting with each step. Some 100 yards in front of us was a couple coaxing their 5-year-old up the same hill. If she could make it, shame on me for tuckering out.
On our final day, Julie had arranged for the same cab company to pick us up in Tignes for the one-hour ride back to the train station, retracing our steps in the direction of Paris. I made a quick trip to the local grocery store Sherpa. As I was at the checkout counter with my fruit and cheese, the cashier asked me how much longer I’d be in Tignes. I wondered if she was this solicitous of all the shoppers, or if my white hair and American accent had prompted this question. I replied that we’d be leaving in a few hours. As I then learned, she was asking the question to everyone in line. When they said the village was closing for the season, they meant it. She wanted everyone to realize that after the store closed that day, it wouldn’t reopen until November.
We had been extremely lucky to slip in those few days of hiking en route to Kinshasa. The terrain with breathtaking views around every turn was like nothing I’d hiked before. The weather proved far better than we’d dared to expect. And Julie’s reminiscences of her childhood visits to Tignes were priceless. As they say in the Michelin guide, ça vaut le voyage.
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