We woke up at Chalet Le Moulin to a breakfast that rivaled our dinner—croissants and Nutella packets! Convincing ourselves that the worst was behind us, we set out from the refuge with Emma and Ohto. Within five minutes, Emma had to remove her Goretex pants and thermal top—she didn’t get the memo about being bold and starting cold.

We proceeded to climb. Hills, boulders, and finally a series of somewhere between 7 and 23 rebar ladders bolted into the rock. A safer version of a via ferrata. We’d heard about these ladders for over a week now, but we didn’t know where they would be on the trail, or how intimidating they’d be. They were easy and fun. Along the way, to confirm how close we were to returning to the hoards of climbers and tourists in Chamonix, we passed climbers clipping their way up fun-looking bolted multipitches. And a fair share of available routes begging to be climbed.

Our first stop was at Lac Blanc. But years of living in the American west had numbed us to the beauty of alpine lakes, and the literal hundreds of tourists (and notable lack of drinking water or bathroom facilities) dulled what would otherwise should been an inflection point of the day.

We felt like the hike was mostly over at that point, but after parting ways with Emma and Ohto, the monotony of traversing the steps above the Chamonix valley started to set in.

It was beautiful, but we had already seen it all! And it was hot. And we were dehydrated. And the town was right below us. Finally, after two hours of rolling trail interspersed with road-walking, we reached the penultimate descent. On the map, it looked like a series of 200 switchbacks directly underneath the gondola we were “supposed” to take back into town. But, we’d gotten this far with minimal mechanical aid. What was one more challenge? Quite a bit, actually, as we had positioned ourselves on top of Chamonix’s famed Vertical Kilometer, or VK. We quickly realized it was not a normal trail, when the thin riddgeline we were traversing was accompanied by sections of fixed lines for balance and support. After about 200 feet we reached a section of incredibly exposed via feratta traversing. Easy enough to manage, but terribly consequential if you were to fall. Morgan was not happy and I was stressed. After descending the exposed section, the trail turned into a series of loose, steep switchbacks, often accompanied by fixed cables. We passed two more short via ferratta sections. Finally, we sat down to take stock of our situation, agreeing that we should turn around and descend another way. Just then, a trail runner appeared out of nowhere. She told us the worst was by far behind us, and we just had some steep trail until we were safe. We took her advice and continued onwards, slowly, carefully, and steadily. There was never a real inflection point, but the lower we got, the less steep the trail became.

Eventually we reached town. We sat down to catch our breath and find the “real” end of the TMB, only to discover one doesn’t really exist. We could walk back to Les Houches to get back to the start, but by this point we were just happy to be down. We went to the airbnb to recover and laid on the pull out couch, coming to terms with the fact that in this adventure, like many others, the journey was the destination. We set aside our completionist attitudes and settled in for the evening reveling in the joy of a hot shower, salt & vinegar chips, and free laundry.