Charmey

This post includes a series of 3 hikes around Charmey. I always did them as separate ones but if you feel very very sporty you can also imagine joinging them.

Gorges de Jogne

• Start point: Parking near the bridge, 710m
• Destination: Barrage de Montsalvans, 800m
• Highest point: Destination
• Distance: ~2.1 km one way
• Elevation gain: ~150 m
• Time: ~1h30 return
• Difficulty: Easy

The start of this hike is in a parking that you can reach turning right just before the bridge at the bottom of the series of bends to go up to Charmey.

From there a large path brings you to a series of galleries that makes a good start for the hike. It continues flat at first along the bed og the river with a series of bridges. 

Finally you start to climb in the forest until you reach the artificial lake with its dam. It takes just 1h30 return and you find picnic tables at the end.

Connecting to the next hike is possible but a bit long as it would require to go all around the lake to Charmey.

Vounetse

• Start point: Parking of TéléCharmey, 890m
• Destination: Vounetse, 1626m
• Highest point: Destination
• Distance: ~5 km one way
• Elevation gain: ~740 m
• Time: 1h30-2h one way
• Difficulty: Moderate

This second hike in Charmey starts at the bottom of the cable car and goea to the top of it. The hike goes mostly across pastures or on the edge of the forest and it offers beautiful views of the hilly moutains around. There is particular difficulty and with about 750m of elevation you can get to the top in 1h30-2h. At the top you'll find a restaurant with refreshments, beautiful paragliders taking off that are nice to watch and a supercool playground for kids (seriously I wanted to play myself with the marbles labyrinths). Once there you can continue directly to the via ferrata as this is exactly the starting point of the 3rd hike, the via ferrata on the wall you see on the photo below, or if you are tired go down by cable car.

Via ferrata

• Start point: Vounetse, 1626m
• Destination: Loop to start
• Highest point: Dent de Vounetse, 1770m
• Distance: ~3 km one way
• Elevation gain: ~200 m
• Time: 2h loop
• Difficulty: Moderate to Hard to Extremely hard depending with via ferrata you take.

This last section is a via ferrata that bring your to the summit of Dent de Vounetse 1770m. In fact there are 3 via ferratas : two of them are K5s so very difficult but one if K3 with K4 variants. And I confirm it is mostly K3 with some short more difficult parts that you can each time decide to skip of not. All vias converge at the summit of the Dent but the fun is not finished yet because you are only at about half the via ferrata. It continues downhill and the highlight is right at the end where a very very veeeery long suspension bridge crosses to the neighouring peak! It was scary! But you can skip it too if you prefer. The final descend depends if you skip the bidge or not. We did it and there are a series of very steep and narrow bends that bring you hack to the cable car in about 30min from the end of the via.