Chamonix to Beaufort, France.

It was cloudy and misty when we woke, so no view up to Mont Blanc. We debated whether to stay a day or not, but the weather did not look to be improving. To our surprise, 15 minutes before we were ready to leave the clouds opened up for a good view of the Mont Blanc range.

The hotel manager gave us directions to Beaufort and a google map printout. The first part of his route was very scenic and hilly! We did a lot of climbing and decending to move only a few km down the valley from Chamonix! Once back on the route we chose from the Cycling the French Alps book which we intended to follow we made good time. We had scattered views of the imposing ranges behind us as the clouds moved in and out. We decided to take a google maps route that cut out riding all the way down to Sallanches. Only problem we found was an extremely steep dirt track for 1km that we could only just push our bikes up. We continued on upwards for several hours until we passed Megeve and then had a nice downhill run to Flumet.  The rest of the ride was up the Col De Saisies (1605m) which was hard work but scenic, 15km at average 8%. It was very cold when we stopped at the little ski resort of Les Saisies to buy supplies. We dressed up for the descent down into Beaufort and kept looking out for a camping spot, but it was all too steep. Eventually we found a clearing near a picnic spot that we settled into. After dinner, and a bottle of wine we went to set up the tent, but to our horror we had no tent poles!!! We had left them somewhere. We ended up making a shelter with the tent fly, the bikes and some long branches. It was actually a comfortable night, luckily it did not rain.

Chamonix to Beaufort 69km

http://maps.google.com?q=45.679181,6.39616+(Albertville)