Hiking the GR5 — Grande Traversée des Alpes

They are not the same thing, and this is the single most confusing point about the route. The GR5 is an international trail running from Hoek van Holland on the North Sea to Nice on the Mediterranean, crossing the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland and France again. The Grande Traversée des Alpes association puts the full length at 2,600 km, though other national federations along the way quote less — the Flemish trail authority says “more than 2,000 km”, French Wikipedia around 2,200 km. Take 2,600 km as the GTA’s own claim rather than a settled fact.

The Grande Traversée des Alpes — the GTA — is the French Alpine section of that trail: Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean, and the only part almost anybody walks. When a British or American hiker says “I’m walking the GR5”, this is what they mean. Confusingly, “Grande Traversée des Alpes” is also the name of the Grenoble-based association that manages and waymarks the route, and there is a separate Italian trail called the Grande Traversata delle Alpi sharing the same initials. Three different things, one name.

Why the GR5 Distance Keeps Changing

You will see the GR5 quoted at anything from 560 km to 725 km, and nobody explains why. Here is the honest answer. The GTA’s own website publishes 600 km on its homepage and 620 km on its itinerary page. FFRandonnée, the French hiking federation, says around 600 km. But add up the GTA’s own 36 published stage distances and you get 560.8 km; measuring their official GPX track gives about 570 km.

Four things move the number: whether you start at Saint-Gingolph or Thonon-les-Bains, whether you take the GR55 through the Vanoise or stay on the main line, whether you finish in Nice or divert to Menton on the GR52, and how much valley walking and refuge detour gets counted. We use about 600 km throughout this guide, because that is the figure both the trail’s governing body and the national federation prefer. Treat any source quoting 620 km to the kilometre as false precision.

Saint-Gingolph or Thonon-les-Bains?

The official route starts at Saint-Gingolph, a village split down the middle by the Franco-Swiss border on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. The GTA’s first stage is titled “De Saint-Gingolph aux chalets de Bise”, and their GPX track begins in the village at lake level, 374 m.

Thonon-les-Bains is a recognised variant, not the main route. The GTA files it under their variants and describes Thonon walkers as rejoining the main itinerary at the Chalets de Bise on stage 2. It exists because Thonon has a mainline SNCF station and Saint-Gingolph doesn’t, which makes it the easier arrival for most people. Both are legitimate — but the reason you see Thonon quoted as the start so often is that Savoie Mont Blanc’s tourist board page uses it, and most English-language articles have copied that page without checking.

The finish is precise: the GTA puts the official end point at the Maison de l’environnement, 31 avenue Castellane, Nice — a few metres above sea level, after 374 m of lake shore and everything in between.

The Highest Point Depends on Which Route You Take

“What is the highest point of the GR5?” has at least four defensible answers, and which is right depends entirely on which trail you choose. Nobody sets them out together, which is why you will see the figure quoted flatly — and differently — almost everywhere.

On the GTA’s official 36-stage itinerary — the route this guide follows, and the one their GPX track describes — the high point is the Col de la Leisse in the Vanoise, between the Refuge du Col du Palet and the Refuge de la Leisse. Its altitude is itself contested: FFRandonnée’s topo-guide 530 gives 2,758 m, which IGN’s own elevation model agrees with, while Wikipedia and most French walking sites give 2,761 m. Nothing else on those 36 stages comes close — Col Girardin is 2,699 m, the Pas de la Cavale 2,671 m, the Col du Palet 2,652 m.

If you take the GR55 through the Vanoise, you cross the Col de Chavière at 2,796 m — higher than anything on the main line.

If you follow the Val-d’Isère to Bonneval-sur-Arc line, you cross the Col de l’Iseran — and this is where the confusion starts. The GTA publishes that stage itself, under les variantes as the historic line, and calls the col “le point le plus haut de l’itinéraire” — meaning that variant, not the GR5 as a whole. It is also a road pass, the high point of the cyclists’ Route des Grandes Alpes, which shares the Grande Traversée des Alpes name. Its roadside signpost reads 2,770 m; IGN gives 2,764 m. That signpost figure is the one that has spread across the English-language internet, usually attached to the GR5 as a whole rather than to this one variant.

And if you take the Col des Fours variant — which leaves the trail at Val-d’Isère and, according to the Refuge du Fond des Fours, has been waymarked since 2013 to reach Bonneval while avoiding the Fornet ski area — you cross 2,976 m. That is the highest ground any GR5 line touches, and FFRandonnée calls it the highest col crossed by any GR at all. Note the GTA does not publish it as one of its own stages.

One myth worth killing while we’re here: Chavière is not “the highest col on any GR route in France”, however often you read it. Three cols beat it — the Col de la Chamoussière at 2,884 m and the Col Vieux at 2,806 m, both on the Tour du Queyras (GR58), and the Col des Muandes at 2,828 m on the GR57. FFRandonnée manages to crown two different cols on two different pages; the reconciliation is that Chamoussière is the highest col on a GR main line, while the Col des Fours is higher still but sits on a variant.

One more trap. The GTA’s own section 3 page describes the Col Girardin (2,699 m) as “le plus haut col de l’itinéraire” — the highest col on the route. Read as a whole-route claim that is wrong: the Col de la Leisse is 62 m higher and on the same trail. Girardin is the high point of that section. Several English guides have repeated it as a route-wide figure.

The GR5 Does Not Cross the Écrins

Tour operators sometimes list the Écrins among the national parks the GR5 crosses. It doesn’t. The Parc national des Écrins is bounded by the Romanche valley to the north and the Guisane and Durance to the east, and the GR5 stays east of that line throughout, coming no closer than about 10 km near Le Monêtier-les-Bains. Briançon, Névache and Montgenèvre aren’t even park communes, so the route doesn’t touch the buffer zone either. What you do get is a long view of the Écrins from the north on the approach to Briançon.

The trail that genuinely circles that massif is the Tour des Écrins (GR54) — 176 km and around 12,000 m of ascent, generally reckoned the hardest of the classic French circuits. If the Écrins is what you’re after, that’s your route, not this one.

While we’re correcting park lists: FFRandonnée’s own article on the route names four regional parks — the Bauges, the Chartreuse, the Queyras and the Préalpes d’Azur. Three of those four are wrong. The Bauges and Chartreuse sit 38 km and 65 km from the track and belong to the GR96 and GR9; the Préalpes d’Azur lies west of the Var, while the GR5’s final stages run east of it. The GR5 crosses two national parks, the Vanoise and the Mercantour, entering the protected core zone of both, and one regional park, the Queyras.

GR5 or Tour du Mont Blanc?

This is the question most people are really asking when they land here, so let’s answer it directly. The two routes share ground for four days — from the Col du Brévent to the Col de la Croix du Bonhomme — and then they could not be less alike.

Do the Tour du Mont Blanc first if you have never done a multi-day Alpine trek. It is shorter, the infrastructure is better, the logistics forgive mistakes, and it delivers the most concentrated mountain scenery in the Alps. Bear in mind though that it’s also the harder of the two to get a bed on.

Do the GR5 when you want a point-to-point adventure rather than an intensive hike. The TMB circles one massif for ten days; the GR5 crosses nine ranges over five weeks and ends in the sea. You will walk for days without meeting anyone, eat better for less, and watch the Alps change from Savoyard dairy country to Mediterranean scrub. It is not harder per day — the daily ascent is comparable — it’s just a lot longer, and that means it’s both mentally and physically more challenging.

This is the full official stage breakdown, with distance and ascent for every one of the 36 stages. The figures come from the Grande Traversée des Alpes association’s own published itinerary — the body that manages and waymarks the route. No guidebook is required to read this table, which is the point: everyone else puts it behind a book or a booking.

A word on conventions. Stage counts differ wildly between sources, and it matters which one you’re reading. The GTA lists 36 stages across its four sections, and FFRandonnée’s own article says 36 — though the GTA’s prose still describes the route loosely as “une quarantaine d’étapes”. Cicerone’s guidebook uses 28, because it combines several short days. Tour operators use whatever fits a week. We use the GTA’s 36 throughout, because it is the only breakdown that matches the official GPX files, the refuge spacing and the section boundaries. If you’re strong, you will combine stages; almost everyone does somewhere.

Section 1: Saint-Gingolph to Les Houches

Section 2: Les Houches to Modane

Section 3: Modane to Larche

Section 4: Larche to Nice

Route total: 560.8 km and 31,395 m of ascent across 36 stages. That ascent figure is simply the sum of the GTA’s own per-stage numbers, and it is the most defensible total available — it sits neatly between FFRandonnée’s “30,000 m” and the raw figure you get from measuring the official GPX, and it is traceable stage by stage rather than dependent on how a piece of software smooths the elevation data.

A few honest caveats about the official data, because we checked it rather than copying it. The GTA’s section 3 page heads itself “130 km et 9 étapes” but then lists ten stages totalling 144.7 km. Sections 1 and 2 do the same thing more quietly, heading themselves 108 km and 166 km against stage sums of 101.5 km and 158.1 km. In each case the headline is wrong and the stage list is right. Section 4’s stage 30 shows 13.8 km in the summary list and 16.4 km in the detail block below — and that second figure, along with its time and both ascent and descent, is a verbatim copy-paste of section 3’s Plampinet-to-Montgenèvre stats. The 13.8 km is the right one; their own GPX for the stage measures exactly that. Section 4 also runs its stage descriptions 1 to 7, then 9, then 8. The stage, section and full-route GPX files all download complete and measure within a rounding error of their published distances.

Most people who complete the GR5 do it over several summers, not in one five-week push — and almost nobody writes for them. Every blog is a thru-hike account and every operator sells you a week. If you have a job, a family, or a sensible amount of annual leave, walking the trail in one-week chunks is not a compromise. It is arguably the better way to do it.

The case for it is practical. You get better weather odds, because a washed-out fortnight ruins a thru-hike but only dents one section. You can walk each range in the month that suits it — the Chablais in late June when the flowers are out, the Mercantour in September when the heat has gone. You spread the cost across years. And you arrive fresh each time instead of grinding through week four on tired legs.

Where to Break the Walk

The right split points are chosen by transport access, not by guidebook chapter. Here is every practical break on the route, with what actually serves it. Note how the picture changes south of Briançon — this is the single biggest constraint on sectional planning and nobody flags it.

The GR5 Over Four Summers

The GTA’s four official sections happen to be well chosen for exactly this, because each one begins and ends somewhere reachable. This is the plan we’d recommend, and it needs roughly nine to eleven days each year including travel.

Summer one — Saint-Gingolph to Les Houches. Seven stages, 101.5 km. The gentlest section in terrain if you survive day one, and it finishes in Chamonix, which makes for an easy journey home and a good excuse to stay a couple of days. Late June or early July.

Summer two — Les Houches to Modane. Ten stages, 158.1 km, and the big one: the Mont Blanc massif, the Beaufortain and the high Vanoise. Rail at both ends and a bail-out at Peisey-Nancroix if the weather turns. Mid-July to late August, because the Vanoise cols need to be clear.

Summer three — Modane to Larche. Ten stages, 144.7 km, through the Clarée, Briançon and the Queyras. If ten days is too many, split it at Briançon: Modane to Briançon is four stages, rail to rail, and is the single best short week on the whole GR5 for anyone travelling car-free.

Summer four — Larche to Nice. Nine stages, 156.5 km, finishing at the sea. Getting to Larche is the hardest logistics on the route — plan it properly, or start this section at Saint-Étienne-de-Tinée and accept you’ve skipped two stages. September is ideal: the heat has broken and the Mercantour is at its best.

If you only ever walk one section, make it the Queyras — Briançon to Larche, six stages. Sunshine, sundials, larch villages and the Col Girardin, with a proper town at one end. It is the stretch thru-hikers most often say they wish they’d walked slower.

Budget €75–95 a day walking hut to hut, which puts a full 36-stage GR5 at roughly €2,700–3,400 for accommodation and food alone. Here is where that goes, using the 2026 prices above.

On top of the daily rate, allow for the fixed costs. The four FFRandonnée topo-guides covering the route are €18.40 each, so about €74 for the set. If you want paper IGN TOP25 maps for the whole trail that’s seventeen sheets in IGN’s own GR5 pack, or nineteen with the Chamonix and Thonon sheets, at roughly €14.30 each — €243 to €272, and close to a kilo of paper to carry. Most people buy the topo-guides and use digital mapping. Add rail and bus at both ends, and a rest-day hotel or two.

Self-Organised Versus a Tour Operator

This is the comparison nobody publishes, so here it is plainly — and the single most useful thing on this page if you are about to book. Take the Lake Geneva to Chamonix week, which almost every operator sells, and the same six walking days cost anything from €605 to €1,375 depending purely on who you buy it from.

The French operators — Allibert, Grand Angle, Altitude Montblanc, La Balaguère, Terres d’Aventure — sell the GR5 as domestic walking and price it accordingly. The English-language ones sell it as an expedition. Macs Adventure at €1,375 is more than double the French market rate for an identical week, and roughly three times what the same nights cost if you book them yourself. That is not a criticism of the product; it is a fact worth knowing before you pay it.

The premium is real and sometimes worth paying — you get booked beds, a route pack, and somebody to call when a refuge cancels on you. But shop across the French operators before you buy from an English-language one, because the same week is on sale at half the price in French.

Where an operator genuinely earns the money is the booking problem. Reserving thirty-six nights across four incompatible systems, several of them email-only and one of them post-a-cheque, is a genuine slog in a second language. If that is the part you dread rather than the walking, paying somebody is a reasonable decision. Baggage transfer is a different question — it works in the valleys but not between high refuges, so on the GR5 it buys less than it does on the Tour du Mont Blanc.

One more line item that isn’t optional: travel insurance that actually covers mountain walking. Check that your policy covers trekking to 3,000 m and helicopter evacuation — many standard policies do not, and the GR5 spends a lot of time above 2,500 m.

Maps, Guidebooks and GPX

There is a free, official GPX download for the whole route. The Grande Traversée des Alpes association publishes the complete track plus per-section and per-stage files on its own website — no account and no payment needed. Take the full-route file from the download button rather than the one the interactive map loads: the map version is a heavily simplified track for rendering, roughly a thirtieth of the size. All 41 files — full route, four sections, 36 stages — download complete.

The FFRandonnée topo-guide numbers you’ll see quoted are usually wrong. The correct chain for the GR5 through the Alps is 504 (Léman to the Vanoise), 530 (the Vanoise, including GR55 and GR5E), 531 (Maurienne to the Ubaye) and 507 (the Mercantour, covering the GR5 and the GR52). They’re €18.40 each. For the record, 505 is the Tour du Queyras GR58 and 506 is the GR51 Balcon de la Méditerranée, long out of print — different trails entirely, and neither has ever been a GR5 volume, though both get cited as one. FFRandonnée publishes no single-volume GR5 guide.

Covering the route in IGN TOP25 at 1:25,000 takes seventeen sheets, and IGN sells exactly that set as a GR5 pack: 3528ET, 3530ET, 3531ET, 3532OT, 3532ET, 3633ET, 3534OT, 3634OT, 3535OT, 3536OT, 3537ET, 3538ET, 3639OT, 3640ET, 3641ET, 3741OT and 3742OT. Add 3630OT (Chamonix) if you want the Brévent crossing covered properly, 3428ET only if you start at Thonon rather than Saint-Gingolph, and 3841OT if you finish on the GR52. At roughly €14.30 a sheet the full nineteen come to about €272, and close to a kilo of paper — which is why most people carry the topo-guides and use digital mapping for the detail. IGN also publishes sheet 89024 “Grande Traversée des Alpes” at 1:220,000, but that’s a planning overview, not a walking map. Watch for “3533ET” in older articles — it’s a phantom number; the Tignes sheet is 3633ET.

IGNrando’ is gone. IGN’s route-sharing platform closed on 20 November 2025 and its data-recovery portal shut in May 2026 — any guide telling you to get GR5 tracks from ignrando.fr is out of date. IGN points users to Cartes IGN instead. It is free, and there is no paid tier — but it cannot cache the 1:25,000 raster offline for licensing reasons, so it is not a substitute for paper or a proper offline mapping app. Its vector Plan IGN base map can be cached.

Reading French Waymarking

The GR5 is waymarked end to end by FFRandonnée volunteers, and the system is simple once you know it — but it is not the same as British or American trail marking, and nobody explains it to English-speaking walkers. The marks are painted rectangles roughly 10 × 2 cm, at about 150 m intervals, on rocks, trees, posts and walls.

White over red means you are on a GR route and going the right way. A flash angled left or right above the two rectangles means the path turns — follow the direction of the angle. Two rectangles crossed to form an X means wrong way: stop and go back. That X is the mark people miss, because instinct says a painted mark means “this way”.

Colour tells you which network you’re on, and this matters on the GR5 because the route braids constantly with local paths. White and red is a GR. Yellow and red is a GRP — a grande randonnée de pays, a regional loop. Yellow alone is a PR, a local day walk. Following a yellow flash because it happens to point the way you’re going is the classic error, and it will quietly take you somewhere else entirely.

Parking and Why You Should Not Drive

The GR5 is linear, and that changes the parking question completely. On a circuit like the Tour du Mont Blanc you park at the start and collect the car at the end. Here, a car left at Saint-Gingolph is 600 km from you five weeks later, on the wrong side of the Alps, and retrieving it costs a day and a long train fare. This is the single most common planning mistake on the route, and no other GR5 guide addresses it.

There are three sensible approaches. Don’t drive at all — the trail is exceptionally well served by rail at both ends, and this is what most thru-hikers do. Park at the finish and travel to the start, so the car is waiting when you’re tired rather than stranded when you’re fresh; leaving it near Nice and taking the train north works, though long-stay city parking for five weeks is expensive. Or, if you’re walking in sections, park at a rail-served break point and do an out-and-back over two trips.

That last option is why the rail-versus-bus distinction in the section table above matters so much. Les Houches, Chamonix, Landry, Bourg-Saint-Maurice, Modane and Briançon all have stations, so you can drive to one, walk to another, and train back to your car in a couple of hours. South of Briançon that stops working — Ceillac, Larche, Bousiéyas and Saint-Étienne-de-Tinée are all bus-only, and Larche is 48 km from the nearest station over a pass that shuts in winter. For the southern half, plan on public transport or accept a much longer retrieval.

Where hotels and gîtes at the trailhead offer parking for guests, that is usually the most secure option and worth asking about when you book your first night — but confirm the arrangement covers the whole period, not just the night you’re staying.

What to Pack

Walking hut to hut, aim for 7–9 kg including water. You need no tent, no sleeping bag and no stove. Walking with a tent instead pushes you towards 12 kg and, given the bivouac restrictions in both national parks, buys you less freedom than you’d expect.

Essentials: broken-in boots with a stiff enough sole for scree, a waterproof jacket and overtrousers, a warm mid-layer even in August, sun hat, warm hat and gloves for the cols, trekking poles, a headtorch, sunglasses and high-factor sun cream — the UV above 2,500 m is fierce and you will be up there most days. Carry at least 1.5 litres of water capacity; the southern sections between Larche and the Tinée get genuinely hot and dry.

Refuge kit: a silk or cotton sleeping bag liner is required almost everywhere, earplugs are non-negotiable in a twelve-bunk dormitory, plus a quick-dry towel and light shoes for the evening. Cash in reasonable quantity, for the reasons above.

For the layering system and the packs that handle five weeks of this, see our technical hiking gear guide and our guide to hiking backpacks — a 40–50 litre pack is the right size for a hut-to-hut GR5.

Training and Fitness

The GR5 is not technically difficult — no rope, no glacier, no scrambling beyond the occasional cabled step. What it demands is endurance. The average stage carries about 870 m of ascent, and the hardest carry twice that, and you do it again the next day, and the day after that, for five weeks.

The honest benchmark: if you can walk 20 km with 1,000 m of ascent carrying 8 kg, and get up and do something similar the following morning without your legs objecting, you’re ready. If you can’t yet, you have a training target rather than a problem. Start at least three months out, build to one long hill day a week with a loaded pack, and — this is the part people skip — train back-to-back days. Consecutive-day fatigue is what ends GR5 attempts, not any single stage.

Two practical notes. First, add 20–25% to guidebook time estimates for your first week until you know how you compare to French walking times, which tend to assume a brisk pace and no photographs. Second, the biggest single day is day one, at 1,701 m of ascent — arguably the worst possible ordering for an unacclimatised walker. Consider splitting it, or spending a night at altitude beforehand.

At 2,761 m the high point is well below the altitude where sickness usually becomes a concern, but you will feel the thin air on the Vanoise cols in the first week.

Park Rules, Massif by Massif

The rules change three times along the GR5, and the differences are not cosmetic. A French national park has a zone cœur — a core zone with legally enforceable rules and real fines — and an aire d’adhésion, a buffer zone where — as the parks themselves put it — the decree creates no particular environmental regulation. As a walker you will feel no restriction there, though the park charter still binds the member communes’ planning decisions. The Queyras is different again: it’s a parc naturel régional, which has no core zone and no rule-making power of its own at all. Its ten communes issue near-identical municipal orders that permit bivouac under conditions rather than banning it, and the genuine no-go areas come from prefectural orders — a total bivouac ban in the vallon de Bouchouse around the Foréant and Egorgéou lakes, and a 20 m corridor either side of the path in the Ristolas-Mont-Viso nature reserve. Most English-language guides blend all three into one vague paragraph.

Note the three different bivouac windows — 19:00–08:00, 19:00–09:00 and 18:00–09:00. They are genuinely different rules, and competitor guides routinely quote one for all three parks. The GTA’s own generic page adds a fourth version; the individual parks’ own pages are the ones to trust.

The dog rule catches people out badly. In both the Vanoise and Mercantour cores, dogs are banned even on a lead — and in the Mercantour, even carried. There is no workaround. Assistance dogs are exempt with the appropriate card. If you walk with a dog, the GR5 through the two national parks is not available to you, though the Queyras is.

In the Vanoise, bivouac is permitted beside a defined list of refuges that includes l’Arpont, the Col du Palet and la Leisse on the main GR5 — but not the Col de la Vanoise or Péclet-Polset on the GR55. The national parks are not the only protected ground you cross. The GR5 also passes through at least four national nature reserves, each with its own rules: Sixt-Passy and Passy around the Col d’Anterne, and Contamines-Montjoie on the shared Tour du Mont Blanc section. Depending on the line you take over the Col du Brévent you may also clip the Aiguilles Rouges reserve. The dog rule differs between them, which is easy to get caught by: leashed dogs are allowed in Contamines-Montjoie but banned outright in Sixt-Passy and the Aiguilles Rouges. In Contamines-Montjoie bivouac is banned below 2,500 m and you must use the designated area at La Balme, for which booking is obligatory and free.

Safety and Mountain Rescue

The emergency number in France is 112 — not 999, not 911. It works from a locked or SIM-less phone, and the operator routes you to whichever unit is on duty. If the signal is too weak for a voice call, 114 takes emergency SMS, which is genuinely useful on this route. Resist the urge to save a direct PGHM number: rescue duty rotates, and you may reach the unit that is off this week.

Who comes depends on where you are. The PGHM (Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute Montagne), CRS Montagne and the fire service’s mountain units share the work, and the arrangement is set département by département rather than by massif — weekly alternation in Isère, the Hautes-Alpes, Savoie and the Alpes-Maritimes, a single service in some départements, mixed crews in the Haute-Savoie. On a full GR5 you pass through several different arrangements without noticing.

Will you be billed? Almost certainly not — but “rescue is free in France” is not quite the law, and it is worth knowing the shape of it. The statute that lets communes charge, article L.2331-4 of the CGCT, covers “any sporting or leisure activity”, which on its face includes walking. The implementing decree, however, still names only downhill and cross-country skiing, and the Interior Ministry’s position is that billing is confined to the ski domain. So a hiker rescued on the GR5 is not charged in practice. What does get billed is a rescue outside that framework — several resort communes charge for off-piste call-outs, and an evacuation you request for convenience rather than injury is a private helicopter booking, not a secours.

That may change. In February 2026 the Cour des comptes recommended that mountain rescue be billed in whole or in part before the end of 2028, citing 9,912 call-outs in 2024 at a cost of at least €10,780 each. It is a recommendation about targeted interventions, not a proposal to end free emergency rescue — but the direction of travel is clear enough to be worth watching.

In any case, what is never free is everything after the winch. The ambulance, the hospital, the treatment and the repatriation are billed normally, and that — not the helicopter — is the honest reason to carry insurance. Standard travel policies frequently exclude trekking above a stated altitude, and the GR5 spends most of its days between 2,000 m and 2,800 m. Check explicitly for hiking to at least 3,000 m, for repatriation, and for what the policy says about unguided activity. Our guide to travel insurance for France covers what to look for.

The practical hazards on the GR5 are unglamorous and predictable. Afternoon thunderstorms build fast in July and August, and you do not want to be on a col at 3pm — start early, which is why refuge breakfast is rarely later than half past seven. Lingering snow on north-facing slopes below the cols is the main early-season risk; a hard névé across a steep slope is genuinely dangerous without an axe. Patous — the big white livestock guardian dogs — are common on the alpages throughout the southern half: stop, stay calm, don’t run, hold your poles point-down against your body rather than raising them, and walk a wide arc around the flock.

Tell somebody your plan for each stage. The refuges are the safety net on this route — if you’ve booked and don’t arrive, someone notices, which is one more argument for booking rather than winging it.