Hiking adventure in Chamonix

While visiting the Joneses for a couple of days on my time off, Ryan and I left the ladies and Liam at home and drove an hour down the road into the French Alps for some hiking fun. Chamonix is pretty much as good as it gets as far as hiking goes. We quickly got some directions from the tourist office and then headed over to a lift to bring us up to the start of the hiking trail.
The ride up lasted a few minutes, but let us have a nice view of the valley and town. It was not the best weather that day and the top of Mont Blanc was sadly covered in clouds. Here is a shot from the start of the hike looking back down on Chamonix.
We set off on the path, with the "Lac Blanc" glacial lake as our destination. It was a "medium" difficulty hike with moderate height change and a fair bit of bumpy ground. I certainly would not have been able to do it with Liam on my back.

Here is a shot a little ways down the path, it is looking back on the lift station/restaurant where we were dropped off. It is the red building in the lower right. As with all the images, click on them for a larger version.
After a ways, we saw the first splash of water. This was just some run off that accumulated in an indent, but I thought it was nice. It was quite a few degrees cooler up there than down on the ground.
We had been walking up for about 30-45 minutes when we stopped for our first break. Time for a drink and a realization that we should have brought some snacks.... our lunch of (yummy) soup suddenly seemed like it could have used some extra supplemental snacks.
After the rest, we continued on, saw more rocks and lichen, but not much else. There were surprisingly few other people hiking the trail. I think most people were taking the lift up to the second higher station then hiking down, as the manly men we are, we got off at the bottom and hiked up. After some more time, we arrived at this sign, telling us we made it.
Just beyond this sign, was a very impressive, broken down disused shack.Beyond the shack was a bridge across some run off to the expected coffee and cake restaurant. It seems all hikers in Europe love cake. It is always there, no matter where you go.The actual lake is split into two parts, a smaller "Lower" lake, seen here with the amazing shack.
Then just above it is the larger, "upper" lake, seen here with a certain very handsome hiker. The water is really an interesting shade of milky white-blue. I think this is because there is still quite a bit of ice at the bottom. It looks really great though and Ryan and I can confirm that it was much much to cold to consider swimming.
After relaxing at the lake a little while, we continued on for another hour or two (I forget) to hike up to the "Index" chair lift. We were going to consider extending the hike farther at that spot, but just as we reached the lift, it started to rain. Since we were tired out of shape hikers, that was a great excuse to hop on the lift and head back down to town for a well deserved snack.Overall a very fine hike that Ryan and I enjoyed very much. We used to go hiking quite a lot when the Joneses were living in Rosenheim, which was both near the mountains and closer to us for visits. Once Liam is old enough to join in the fun I hope we can start up some hiking once again. For the moment, I think it is still something that is more enjoyable with just the adults.

Besides, sometimes it is nice for just the men-folk to get off and do something on our own, we don't do that very often.