Lac Labarre / Valsenestre

Today was our one year anniversary of our wedding, and to celebrate we had plans to go on a hike near the Alpe d'Huez to an alpine lake. Unfortunately, the traffic was backed up to the auroute, and neither of us relished the thought of two hours stuck in traffic behind diesel belching cars. Instead, we quickly re-routed, and I remembered that there were two small towns in the Ecrins park near La Mure. We took the slow but pretty departmental routes up past La Mure, overlooking the lac Monteynard, through Valbonnais, and finally on to the small village of Valsenestre

We looked at the map, hoping to find another lake that we could hike to, but the closest one was a bit more ambitious than we had hoped for. Lac Labarre, at ~2400 meters was only 5.5 km away, but more than 1100 meters (2600 feet) up from the village and was estimated to take 3 hours and 40 minutes. Since we had gotten a late start, we arrived in the village at 2:30, and we didn't want to get back at 9 pm! None of the other hikes looked that interesting, and the thought of an ice cold glacial lake was too tempting, seeing as we had been enduring temperatures in the high 90s recently. We moved pretty quickly, but started running out of water at around 400 meters. I guess 3 litres isn't enough for a hot day! There was a spring on the side of the mountain, and since we hadn't seen any livestock, we threw caution into the wind, and filled our bottles with the freezing and delicious mountain water. We were both very relieved, because with no water we would have had to retreat! Around 100 meters higher, we reached a plateau which was teeming with sheep, crapping and peeing everywhere. We tried various rationalizations (the water we had found wasn't the same water, the rocks would filter the water etc etc), but neither of us were totally convinced. Here I am 2/3 up the hike:

Two hours and ten minutes after starting the hike we arrived at the lake via a small stream on a plateau


and after eating and resting for a while, continued on to the col de la romeiou (2439 meters officially, but not really)


where we took some victory shots




as well as a nice panorama (If you have a DSL connection you should definitely check these out! JPG format and QTVR format)
We congratulated ourselves heartily, and then started walking down again


and got back down to Valsenestre at 7:30.

It was a perfect way to celebrate our first anniversary, and hopefully we'll find something equally good next year!