Sometime around 1 AM I woke up and the sky was full of bright flashes. I knew a storm was coming, and it looked powerful based on the constant flashing, but sometimes they pass nearby. As it got brighter Betty woke up and noticed it too, but the stars were still visible. A little while later the rain started, then some thunder. There were too many flashes to know which lightning strike went with with thunder clap, so I wasn’t able to estimate how far away it was until it was obviously right overhead. Flash-flash flash flash fash boom! The rain came down so hard it bounced up under the lip of the tent and was getting me wet, then it started to hail, but luckily only small hail.
The storm eventually passed and it was bizarrely calm, I actually got out of the tent because the stars looked amazing but a new set of clouds came in before I could take pictures. There was a little more flashing, but we managed to fall somewhat asleep and the next storm cell missed us.
We hadn’t really slept all that well, but woke up around 7 and enjoyed sunrise, then got packed up.
We stopped at the refuge nearby and had breakfast, but sadly they were busy cleaning and had a helicopter coming for a drop off so no coffee.
We hiked down the valley to the road at the bottom, and then up the other side. We stopped for lunch on the way up. At the top we were faced with a decision to either take a direct path, which has warnings and a steep drop with a cable to hang on to, or hike down the other side and back up, roughly the amount of the drop of the direct path (I’d guess 1,000 feet, but I don’t know). We checked out the pass and it looked like Too much for my fear of heights, but to really depends on the width . We were undecided, then came a couple down the path with park shirts, I asked them how wide the path was and they said about 2 feet wide. So naturally we went around.
When we got back up we stopped into the refuge and asked about the trail to the next refuge and although he only spoke Spanish and French and we only speak English and German, he managed to communicate that it wasn’t enough time to make it. So we had a nice relaxing camping evening at Refuge d’ Arrémoulit. We found a campsite out of sight of the refuge on a lake and it even had a stone bench and dinner table which we sat at to eat our Indian lentils burritos? Indian lentils with tortillas instead of naan.
