Tour des Aiguilles Rouges

Date of your route : Aug 03, 2025
Reliability of the description : ★★★★★ Very good
Ease of following the route : ★★★★★ Very good
Route interest : ★★★★★ Very good
Very busy route : Yes

There were two of us who did this 5-day tour this summer, from 3 to 7 August 2025.
It's a superb route with views of Mont Blanc at every stage.
The weather was perfect, after the rains at the end of July and before the heatwave that began on 7 August.
We were camping, so we were carrying quite a lot, which made the route quite difficult with some very steep climbs.
We extended the first stage by going past the Refuge de Moede Anterne (too crowded) to sleep near the chalets in Villy.
For the second day, we booked a meal at the Pierre à Bérard refuge (good welcome but very average food) and a place for our tent, and learned that there would be no water along the rest of the route, except in bottles (at £5 for a 1.5 litre bottle!!!) we also learned that we should have booked the bivouac for the Refuge du Lac Blanc (we wanted to take the alternative route that goes via Lac Blanc) and for the Refuge de Bellachat, which we hadn't done. We are in fact in the Aiguilles Rouges nature park, which is a protected site. We had to leave the park to camp (the park rangers are there to check reservations) because everything was full, which meant we had to walk for another hour and ended up above the Refuge Flégère, a long stage but a peaceful campsite.
The next stage, Flégère-Bellachat, is also very beautiful, with a balcony path before climbing up to Brévent, where we had a magnificent view of Mont Blanc thanks to the clear sky.
We had the same problem at Bellachat, where all the pitches were booked, so we had to leave the park again.
Negative points of the bivouac hike: lack of water for washing (except in the Bérard torrent), the obligation to reserve bivouac sites and the need to buy water in the refuges unless you have filter bottles or tablets. Contrary to the water points indicated in the description of the stage from Refuge Pierre in Bérard to Refuge Flégère, we were unable to refill our water supplies at the reception chalet at the Col des Montets because it was closed for renovation work!
In terms of crowds, we encountered people on the climb up to Buet (many trail runners) and from the Col des Montets to Brévent and then Bellachat, but the other sections were quiet.
On the plus side, it was a magnificent hike!

Machine-translated