Under Snow - March 2006

Les Reches from the snowed under approach road.  Going to need to get some serious snow chains to make it here in the winter.

Snow up to the balcony beams.

Afternoon on the Via Ferrata

Gathering for the ascent.

At the top of the valley, just before you get to the Vanoise National Park, is a Via Ferrata, which to the uninitiated is a steel cable bolted to the mountain with hand and foot holds which enable talentless climbers like us to pretend we're real mountaineers.

Views of Les Reches from the Paraglider

Set in on the edge of the Communal Forest of Landry and slap bang in an alpine meadow.

The temporary roof lives on! But not for much longer.

The cables for the Vanoise Express, linking Les Arcs and La Plagne go in.

Installing a First Floor

Summer 2006 and we were all back out at Les Reches to install a first floor in the main barn. We were able to reclaim about 40% of the floor boards that were needed, and quite a few of the floor joists too.  I decided to ignore practicality and keep the floor joists as per the original flooring.  The joists are essentially larch trees which have two sides squared off, and a rebate cut down the centre line of these 2 sides. The 2" tongue and groove floorboards then sit in this rebate. A second joist is then positioned at the opposite end of the boards with a third joist, squared on its top face only, offered up to the mid point on the underside of the floorboards.  The downside to keeping these over engineered joists is that the upper half of the tree protrudes above the level of the floor boards.

Where there wasn't enough original flooring available we installed seasoned sawn larch which James patiently tongue and grooved with a router.

Some of the Team to Date

Ted

Dickie

Tim

James

Gus

Tris

Lunch for the boys

And then the Wall was Finished

The wall is rebuilt!! 5 metres high, 13 metres long and somewhere in the region of a metre thick at the base, tapering to 600mm at the top. We were given an old photo which showed a balcony, and recovered an old beam from the rubble during the cleanup.  We used this beam as our template to carve 4 new larch beams which we built into the wall as we went. 

 A "temporary" (now in it's eighth year) roof was put on by Kevin, Ted and I in October 2002. Kevin camped in the field whilst Ted and I pitched tent in the main barn.

We Make a Start on the Wall

Mike joined us over the summer as chief muck mixer.  The trusty Volvo towed a ton of sand from the Sablier de Bellentre everyday, which Mike dutifully knocked up together with hydraulic lime to make our mortar.  We used the old lime mortar, sieved, as an agregate for a mortar that we used on the front face of the wall, with the aim of ensuring that the new wall blended as well as could be expected with the old.

The old door was "rehung" in preparation for the walls to come and meet it.

One stone at a time the wall starts to take shape.

Views and Facilities

Looking back across the access road from the dunny.

A piece of history (still) in action. The dunny. Plans are afoot to install a septic tank over the summer, so be quick if you want a chance to use the dunny.

Looking out from Les Reches. Mont Blanc is hiding around the corner to the right, although it can be seen from the fire road as you walk to Les Reches.

Back in the Mists of Time

Back in the mists of time, well 2002 we purchased Les Reches. Set on the side of the mountain just below Les Arcs and Vallandry, this old "Chalet d'Alpage"was in a pretty poor state of repair.

Part of the roof had fallen in and one of the main walls had followed suit shortly afterwards. The rest of the roof was pretty precarious and it was perhaps more by luck than judgement that the building remained standing during the 6 months of the winter of 2001/2002 that it took for the purchase to go through.

One entire face of the chalet had collapsed, leaving a huge pile of stone and old lime mortar blocking the public right of way that leads walkers from Le Villaret on up to Les Charmettes.


Over the next couple of months we cleared away this debris, saving the old lime mortar to use as agregate in our new mortar, and rebuilt this main wall. We were able to recover the original timber door and frame and with the help of old photos leave openings for windows and balcony doors in, as close as we could guage, original positions.

We had a number of friends and family helpers come and aid us in our works that first summer, with sometimes just 1 or 2 people working and other days there were half a dozen souls on site.