Travelling on foot
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Making friends at the Combe de Crousette

My motivation to write about the Alps is not high. I feel there's not much I can say about the Alps that's not common place. Yet traversing the range (or a significant section of it) while camping out most nights, packing several days worth of food at a time or not climbing any peaks is probably not the most typical activity people do in these mountains so there may still be something of interest. I'll try to focus on that.

During the GR 5 traverse, I was never more than a couple hours hike from some kind of civilization and if I count on the stuffed huts that couple of hours happened very few times, if any. The Alps are no wilderness and the GR 5 is certainly not the most remote you can get in these mountains. It's dead easy and requires no big planning effort to hike the GR 5 and get lodging every night.

In my (very limited) experience, lots of people use the GR 5 trail system but it seems not many try to hike it all and even less attempt any kind of extended self sufficiency. It will be odd to leave the last village only to climb up to some alpine meadow for camping but once there you'll quickly forget the taverns you missed. It's beautiful up in the alpine and these mountains are famous for a reason or two.

In the chronological order of things:

Ideas, inertia and borrowing form the past

Story and aftermath