TMB Day 8: Balmes to Bionassay

This is the blog post about our eighth day hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc. Check out my summary post with all my tips for planning your own TMB!

The Tour du Mont Blanc is a 165km hiking loop around Mont Blanc, with nearly 9km of elevation gain into the sky, through 3 countries: France, Switzerland and Italy. You can go as fast or as slow as you want, staying in your choice of the many refuges (mountain huts) along the way at night. I know people who've done the whole loop in 3 days, and others who take it slow and go for 12 days. Connor, a friend and fellow hiker from Vancouver, and I planned a 9-day trek on the TMB.

Day 8: Balmes to Bionassay

Total distance: 18.72km

Total elevation gain: 444m

Total elevation loss: 809m

Refuge we stayed at: Auberge de Bionassay

Countries: France

We savoured this morning in Balmes, intentionally sleeping in, choosing to eat slowly at breakfast and be the last people to check out and pay from the hut… all because after our 3 strenuous 30km+ hiking days, the 19km ahead of us seemed like a total breeze.

We watched the sunrise, quietly judging the day 2 TMBers (since pretty much everyone else was early on in their journeys going the other direction) who didn’t finish every morsel of their breakfasts - they’ll soon learn that every bite is fuel and not to be wasted!

Then it was time to pack up, check out and saunter down the last long steep stretch of the TMB, rewarded with plenty of sweet treats and a baguette the size of Morgan’s torso from the local patisserie in Les Contamines-Montjoie. We finished our day in the early afternoon with a final scramble up to Bionassay and ate lunch in the shade of a half-built hotel, before checking in to our final hut of the TMB where I promptly passed out for a 4-hour long nap in the converted horse stables we were calling home for the night. I woke up in time for a delicious dinner - our final one as the TMB crew…

READ MY ENTIRE TMB JOURNEY HERE!