Tour du Mont Blanc Stage 7: La Fouly to Champex Lac

This guide to the Tour du Mont Blanc Stage 7 will help you plan the route from La Fouly to Champex Lac in Switzerland.

Lake at Champex Lac, with forested mountainsides in view and people on paddleboards in the water.

After concluding Stage 6 at the very nice Camping des Glaciers, we were ready to tackle Stage 7, which is from La Fouly to Champex Lac. It's one of the often-skipped sections of the Tour du Mont Blanc.

After hiking this portion of the trail, I can say that it's true this section is lacking the big views of some other sections.

However, there are multiple great food options, the road walk portion goes through some really cute Swiss towns, and the forested climb to Champex Lac is filled with cute wooden animal sculptures.

We found this section enjoyable, although I did struggle more on this uphill than on the more scenic uphills we'd enjoyed the last two days.

Tour du Mont Blanc Stage 7: Activity Profile

11.5 miles
2,497-foot ascent
2,359-foot descent

See my gear recommendations for the TMB here.

Tour du Mont Blanc Stage 7: The Goal

Our goal today was to walk from the village of La Fouly to that of Champex Lac, which would involve quite a bit of road walking and then a forested uphill section.

La Fouly: A Walk in a Swiss Valley

This section of trail is a nice, easy walk. I found it to be a nice break from the hard hiking days.

The trail started with road walking and then transitioned to a forested trail.

Backpacker walking on road through village to begin Stage 7 of the Tour du Mont Blanc.

There was one cliff walk section with a chain. The path was fairly wide, and the chain probably wasn’t needed. (Maybe I would’ve felt differently in bad weather.)

Cliff walk section of Stage 7 of the Tour du Mont Blanc with sheer drop down one side.

And then we were back to an easy trail without drop-offs.

Dirt trail through heavily forested section of Stage 7 of the Tour du Mont Blanc.

Along the way, we stopped at La Kabana for crêpes and coffee. This was an absolutely delicious stop and I highly recommend it.

Don't forget to bring cash for food and drink on this trail! Here are some more of our lessons learned on the TMB.

After our crêpe stop, we had more road walking through cute towns. There were more food options through here if crêpes aren’t your thing.

Timber and stone buildings on village street.

Then we began a long, seemingly never-ending uphill towards Champex Lac.

This section was forested and without major views, but there were lots of cute woodland creature sculptures along the path.

Wooden squirrel sculptures alongside trail.

Wooden sculpture of boar alongside trail.

We also passed an interesting looking cave (but did not go inside) and big rock with a locked gate in the front. (I'm unclear on what this could be!)

Cave opening alongside trail on Stage 7 of the Tour du Mont Blanc.

Gated opening in sheer cliff face on Stage 7 of the Tour du Mont Blanc.

When we finally arrived at Champex Lac, we admired the lake and then went to Le Cabanon and had a fantastic Swiss Rösti, beer and the best limoncello spritz I’ve ever tasted. (Granted, this was my first ever limoncello spritz, but I liked it a lot more than an Aperol Spritz and will try making this version at home!)

Lake at Champex Lac, with forested mountainsides and large villa on the shore.

Swiss rosti, a potato cake topped with egg, on a plate next to a glass of limoncello spritz and a glass of beer.

Le Cabanon restaurant and lodge on lakeside.

We stopped at a supermarket to refill our food bag, and then walked over to the lake to soak our feet and enjoy the view for a few minutes.

Finally, we got up and walked to Refuge Relais d’Arpette, where we had booked a private room. There are also multiple camping options near the end of Stage 7, including here at Relais d'Arpette.

We planned on this spending the night at this spot (which is slightly off-trail, on variant 8) so that we could more easily do the stage 8 Arpette variant the following day, but the weather did not cooperate.

With rainy skies in the forecast, we instead decided to do the original TMB stage 8 the next morning.