One more col to cross

Luckily we will just be finished before this and any temptation can be resisted..

A long day starts early from Beaufort with a total of about 1600m of climb to be done. (About the same as Ben Nevis from sea level and then some more again!) This is the view to the north by mid-morning. 

And a couple of hours later looking north-east to Mt Blanc across the Lac de Roselend. It is impossible to stop taking photo after photo of this mountain..

There are some terrific rocky ridges above us at about 2500-3000m - here's one, with Richard, in mid-afternoon. We've just cooled off with a dip in the torrent in the valley bottom that feeds the Lac de Roselend. 

A night in a refuge on the Plan de la Lai. 

The quite open Plan and the Cormet de Roseland just above provide a surprising amount of high altitude cattle grazing above 1800-2000m. Hay has just been made in the more level accessible bits. Small herds with bells and with the same little mobile milking parlours I saw in the Massif des Bauges.

Then it's goodbye to the Beaufortain and down to another refuge in a valley that comes up from Bourg-St-Maurice to the south. The last col to cross is at the head of this valley. The 2500m Col de la Seigne will bring us around the south of Mt Blanc. It also marks the border with Italy and so will end the long march across France. It's somewhere out of sight in the centre of this picture, beyond the ridge in the middle distance and before the 'needles' sticking up behind.