Hiking around Chamrousse

From the few hikes that my husband and I have done, we have never had a chance to visit lakes up in the mountain, so we were quite eager to do so. We decided to check out the lakes in Chamrousse, it was quite a good choice because there are a few lakes you can pass whilst hiking around Chamrousse.

We took bus 6010 from Grenoble bus station early at 07:25 in the morning. Sadly in the summer there are only 3 buses going to Chamrousse, as it counts as low season. There are more buses in winter because Chamrousse is a ski resort, so winter counts as high season. We decided that we were going to spend the whole day in Chamrousse as there are also only 3 buses going back to the city for the day, so we brought quite a lot of food and water. There is a hiking map from the Chamrousse Mountain Park website which is handy, it shows the different hikes you can do: https://en.chamrousse.com/hiking-trails-map.html

We decided to start at Chamrousse 1750 - Roche Beranger and made our way to Lac des Vallons, which seemed to be a small man-made lake. From there we hiked our way up to Lacs Robert. We saw cows and sheep being herded which was pretty cool. However, not long after we started climbing, there was a lot of fog and we couldn't see much. We had to go through very rocky paths, and there were even left over snow/ice, and we just couldn't see the view. We were worried that when we get to the lake we weren't going to be able to see anything. However, when we arrived at Lacs Robert, the clouds started to shift, and it was marvelous. The water was cold but there are people having a dip. The water was clear, and there were hills surrounding the water. We took our time there because we knew we had plenty of time, it didn't take long to climb up, maybe around 2 hours. We even saw a helicopter landing and taking off which was cool. There was also a small refuge building which I heard can be rented for people wanting to camp on site.

Afterwards, we made our way to Lac Achard, but along the way we decided to climb up La Botte, one of the peak that stands at 2248m, only 2 meters less than La Croix, the peak at Chamrousse. There was no one else on top of La Botte so we took our time there to have lunch and even prayed Dhuhr. The view was incredible, on one side we saw even taller mountain ranges which still has some snow, and on another side there was a vast sea of clouds. We eventually decided to go back down and walk towards Lac Achard, but little did we know there were more lakes, smaller ones that weren't shown in the map, along the route to Lac Achard.

Lac Achard was different to Lacs Robert, there are pine trees (I think they are pine anyway) surrounding the lake, and there are flat areas where people are setting up tents to spend the night in. I won't be able to choose a favourite if I had to choose between the two lakes, I think they are great in their own different ways. We couldn't spend too long at Lac Achard though as we had to make our way back to Chamrousse 1750 to catch the bus. Even the walk back through the forest was lovely, the trek had different terrains and small rocky bits which made it interesting. Overall this is definitely one of the best hikes I've done, I would recommend it to anyone staying in Grenoble!