Alan Castle, who scribed the section on the Tour de Queyras in the overall guide to Trekking in the Alps, starts with the words “Contained within a fortnight’s holiday, this tour would make a splendid introduction to the alps – and to the joys of Alpine trekking” “Isolated and unspoilt, villages and valleys of the Queyras region will be as memorable as peaks and passes as the route weaves a meandering course against the Italian border in the French départment of Hautes-Alpes.
It was these words, and the designation as moderate grade (as against the strenuous and demanding elsewhere in the book) that settled us on this as our first trek in the Alps. Actually that’s not wholly true – the real persuading factor was the sentence “largely unknown to outsiders, and is one of the Alps’ best kept secrets”!
There are many many moments of this trek that surface from the memory and drift through my mind, like the floaters that drift through the film on your eyes.
The guide sets out a route setting off from the station at Montdauphin-Guillestre joining the GR58 at the first refuge and returning to the station eleven or twelve days later – depending on whether you detour into Italy – hopefully exhausted but happy. We had intended to do this full route but ended up missing off the ‘Pizza and pasta’ section in favour of a days rest, as I will explain later.
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