A Guide to Hiking the GR56 with Kids

This past August our family took on our second hike as a family. I had been looking forward to this summer as an opportunity to access some wild and remote, high-altitude place that would not be a reasonable hike during the Spring or Autumn seasons. Therefore, I selected the GR56, the “Tour de l’Ubaye”, in the Ubaye valley of the southern Alps, very close to Italy. It turns out, this was not the perfect choice for our family, as we had no experience hiking in the mountains together, and would have benefited from a less strenuous experience for our first. I did not realize that the path would be along the edge of a cliff or serious drop for large portions of the trail. My wife was obviously not pleased with this, and I wasn’t either. Nevertheless, we completed the trail, and I would like to detail how a family could hike the GR56 together, and under what conditions one should consider taking on this trail with their children.

Planning

The idea which I want to repeatedly drive home is that a family must be full of capable hikers to do this trail. You need to extensively plan this hike in order to accomplish it, and during that planning you will discover the various challenges. The first and most obvious is that in order to complete the hike, you will need to climb up a total of 8700 meters. Secondly and more importantly to me, there are very few places to get food on this hike. My main issue is that I’m not interested in eating out at restaurants or paying for the expensive refuges along the trail, but really that’s almost all there is. My plan for food resupply worked out, but it made for a difficult hike. Finally, besides the aforementioned cliff edges which form quite a lot of the trail, the terrain is just basically quite difficult, with several portions on which you need to hold onto a wire for safety. You also need to climb up by hand several times. This can be hazardous when done in the rain or high winds.

If you have already done a hike with your family, then you know to start planning months in advance. I won’t go into the budget you should set aside, because in my view your health and happiness are the most important, and this hike being what it is, you should not prioritize savings over your hiking experience. Ultimately if you don’t stay at refuges and don’t eat at restaurants, then you aren’t going to spend much at all. If you spend every night in a refuge, that will drastically increase your spending.

Your family’s hiking ability is the most important factor to consider. If you can’t hike continuosly for most of the day, then you risk being in a difficult position. You could alternatively hike at a faster pace than we did, but I would caution against unwarranted optimism when it comes to hiking fast with your children in the Alps. For us, we are a determined bunch, and with good planning we were able to meet our goals and keep enough food to get us to where we needed to be each day. This, in turn, allowed us to resupply when we no longer had food to eat, and find good spots to sleep each night.

Dates

This is a summer hike. In my experience, the hottest month of the year in France is August, and so I wanted to hike the Ubaye when our home would probably be too hot to be comfortable. I knew that being up at high altitude, the heat of August would be well-tempered by the cold air of the Alps. I’m happy with our choice to do the hike in the middle of August, as it made for beautiful sunny days in the mountains for most of our trip, and those times that we experience rain and cloud-cover were acceptable given the higher base temperatures.

Travel

For public transportation, the launching point is the city of Gap. From there, you take a bus towards Barcelonette, getting off just before at La Fresquière in Méolans-Revel. I think I may have made a minor mistake in our travel plans, as I bought cheap tickets from Paris to Marseille, then took a regional train back North to Gap. I didn’t realize that a night train exists from Paris to Gap, and that we could have used that instead of spending a full day to travel to the start of the trail.

Not having a train station in the vicinity was a new experience for us, but it all worked out fine. The bus travels between Gap and Barcelonnette several times a day, and we were able to travel to and from the area without issues. That being said, there were no good opportunities to quit the hike and find public transportation in the middle of the hike. Certainly options can be found off-trail, but the most sensible thing to do is simply finish the hike if at all possible at La Fresquière.

Clothing

I suffered a little bit because I did not bring a jacket or raincoat. I only had a very light T-shirt and shorts. In August, I did fine with that for the most part. There were a couple of occasions in the early mornings or at high altitude where I started to get rather cold and needed to hike faster to get out of a bad situation. My decision was based on a backpack chock-full of food for my family, but that was an extreme case. For a summer hike, I think a T-shirt and shorts should be fine, with the addition of a raincoat.

Gear

I have already spoken about our gear on our first hike, but the summary as a hiking family is that we share as much as we can. Me being a bit more experienced, it was convenient for me to carry our 4-person tent, and relieve any extra weight from our children and my wife as much as possible. This is an important point if this is your first time hiking in the Alps, as the altitude gains will increase the difficulty enough that you won’t want to be carrying any unnecessary gear.

Our 4-person tent once again worked out very well, and basic 3-season sleeping bags were fine for a summer hike in the Alps. It got chilly at night, but we did not normally sleep at very high altitude. As previously stated, the adults carried 35-liter packs, and the children carried very small childrens’ backpacks. Our basic strategy remained the same, and the children carried food and very lightweight items.

We carried extra fuel (alcohol) because we knew we wouldn’t find any to buy along the way. Though it was heavy at first, over time it became lighter as we continued to cook our meals, and we used it all up by the end of our hike. Cooking meals worked well for us because dry noodles are quite light, and are acceptable for our children plain, and with some basic sauce for us.

We didn’t carry the children’s cameras, enjoyable as they were on the first hike. There were very few opportunities to recharge them, and we wouldn’t have gotten much use out of them before they became dead weight. I only was able to recharge my own phone one time, and barely used it except to take photos and write my daily journal entries.

This hike really enforces the ultralight principles if you are bringing children, as they will not be able to carry much weight, and yet require food and sleeping gear for days of hiking. My backpack never really got much lighter as the hike went on, as I continually replaced eaten food from my pack with other things taken from the rest of our family.

Test Hike

We did a short test hike, not to train specifically for mountain hiking, but rather to get in the rhythm of walking together, and preparing to cover a good amount of distance each day. We hiked back to Rambouillet from another town along the GR1. The test hike showed us we needed new shoes, and prepared us a little bit mentally for the challenge of the GR56, just in terms of hiking together as a unit. The real physical challenge of the Alpine terrain was something we could not have seen in our region of France.

Hiking

Given the difficulty of this hike, I really recommend planning everything in detail. Have your goals each day, knowing that you want to get a certain distance in order to not run out of food. For us, we hiked over four days before resupplying in Larche. Before that, the only other food we got was bread in Bayasse, and a galette in Bousiéyas. The fact that there was not much to eat between those two points determined much of our hike.

The walk itself was quite challenging, with over 1000 meters of elevation gain each day. We found that we were a bit stronger in the mornings, with the children being less motivated in the afternoons. Of course, it was also colder in the mornings, so I was pushing us to keep moving as we hiked through high Alpine passes in a chilly breeze before the sun had warmed us.

Going in to the hike, I thought that it would be a lot of fun to sleep in the cabins that are strung out along the trail. And indeed it was, but we were only able to do that on the first two nights. After that, the cabins were all locked and private, and the few cabins that were public were in poor condition and not necessarily in the right spots for us to stop.

We were once again amazed at the resilience of our children, who laughed and played at night in the tent, despite having hiked all day and up at high elevation. They did their fair share of complaining, but they accomplished the feat of the GR56 nonetheless, and we are quite proud of them. Once again, I don’t recommend doing this hike with young children because the level of difficulty may make it unenjoyable for them, and for you as well. We definitely crossed that line at times during our hike, when the hike became a task instead of an adventure.

It was still a positive experience all things considered, and it gave me another reason to be proud of our family as we held hands at the finish line, back where we started after completing the GR56 loop.