Autumn is one of the most beautiful seasons in the Alps. Silence reigns for a few months before the skiers return. Nature reclaims its rights and transforms itself, week after week.
Le fall foliage shines on beautiful sunny days and brightens up the foggy and grey atmospheres of bad days. At high altitudes, you have to seek out larch forests to immerse yourself in a reddish, even yellow atmosphere.
So it is in the valleys covered with larches that we will find the most beautiful walks to admire the most beautiful autumn foliage in the French Alps.
Friends photographers, friends of nature, friends of the Alps, take note, the season is short, just a few weeks, before the snow drops the needles and covers everything with its white coat.
Let's explore five sites in the French alps.
Autumn landscape in the Chamonix valley.
With a unique landscape of glaciers and peaks over 4000 metres above sea level, the Chamonix valley allows you to find extraordinary spots to enjoy both the autumn colours and the contrast with the first snow which is already covering the peaks.
My two favourites are at both ends of the valley. The first is on the heights of Les Houches: the Col de Voza. The second is on the road to the Col des Montets, at the hamlet of Trélechamp.
Le Voza pass is accessible in autumn only on foot. But it is a very beautiful walk that follows paths that climb slowly into the mountain in the silence of autumn days. You can go up from Les Houches, but also from the hamlet of Bionnassay a few kilometers from Saint Gervais Mont Blanc.
In both cases, the view opens up as soon as you arrive at the pass. On one side you can admire the Chamonix valley and the glaciers that descend the slopes of Mont Blanc and on the other the more confidential and wild side of the massif that overlooks the Val Montjoie.
Following the Mont Blanc Tramway railway line, which in the winter season links the ski areas of Saint Gervais Mont Blanc and Les Houches and in the summer will soon return to its final destination of the Nid d'Aigle at an altitude of 2300 metres, you can reach the imposing building of the Bellevue hotel.
This old hotel, which since the end of the 19th century was filled with mountaineers eager to conquer the summit of Mont Blanc, was to be reborn for a second life, becoming a hotel again, but an ecological hotel, to the point that it was designed not to waste more energy than it creates. To heat the rooms and bedrooms it uses solar and geothermal energy, the windows have triple glazing and there are no balconies in order to avoid any thermal bridges creating a loss of energy.
Unfortunately, the reality was different. The hotel could never be operated because it did not comply with the permit obtained. Today, it remains like a shipwrecked ocean liner at the foot of Mont Blanc. The view, however, remains extraordinary. You can continue the hike to Mont Lachat. To get a first idea of the landscape that awaits you up there, follow this link to access the Prarion webcam, just above the Col de Voza.

At the other end of the valley, the small hamlet of Trélechamp is dominated by the majestic Aiguille Verte. This small balcony above Argentière, on the road that leads via the Col des Montets to Vallorcine and then into Valais, Switzerland, allows you to observe the ice front of the Argentière glacier and that of the Tour. By turning your head to the left and following the Aiguilles de Chamonix, your gaze stops on the large white domes, the highest of which is the summit of Mont Blanc.
A few larches surround the small hamlet, protected by large spruces. The habitat is composed of pretty private wooden chalets and a space strewn with strange statues that look like large faces. Wooden moai, a bit like on Easter Island.
We don't come here for the sculptures, whose presence is nonetheless striking, but for the landscape of the Mont Blanc range.
There are certainly denser and brighter larch forests, further down in the valley, along the Arve, but these two dominant points play their role as lookouts: from these places we observe the advance of winter, with the line of snow gradually descending from the peaks towards the valley, gradually covering the red landscapes of autumn.

The autumnal adornment of the forests of Haute Maurienne
Haute Maurienne is one of the kingdoms of larches. It is around Bessan that we will start our hike. Indeed, the pretty village perched at more than 1700 meters above sea level is part of this series of villages inhabited year-round that make the landscapes of Haute Maurienne so pleasant and so gentle, far from the ski resort atmospheres present in other valleys. It has its old church, its old town hall, its old fountain…
Here, it is stone that dominates, just like in Bonneval on Arc, less than ten kilometers further, more famous and more photogenic. The cold from the high peaks descends to the bottom of the valleys and stagnates all night, which very quickly cools the site of Bessans.
It is also here that the French cross-country ski team resumes its autumn training, often on snow preserved by snow farming, just like in Livigno, Italy, for the same reasons.
This is to say that winter conditions arrive there early in the season, earlier than anywhere else. And so, the larches quickly turn red from the end of October.
We can also observe the progress of the autumn colours thanks to the webcams installed on the official Bessans website, By clicking on this link.
A lovely walk will take us from the communal forest of Bessans, behind the village towards the Avérole valley.
When autumn is in full swing, the yellow needles of the larches fall in a shower of golden twigs that sparkle in the sun. The landscape becomes magical. The ground is covered with a golden carpet that reflects the light.
But we must act quickly because the first snowfalls are early and quickly cover this beautiful landscape which will not emerge from its white blanket until the following April.
In Bessans, you should also take the time to stroll between the houses in search of wooden sculptures of devils. The Devil of Bessans is a legendary character of this high valley, whose story is told in This article published in Nos Alpes, a cross-border newspaper.

Autumn in the Clarée Valley
Le Brianconnais shines brightly as soon as autumn sets in.
In fact, larches colonize the slopes of these sunny mountain ranges, just like on the side of the Col de Montgenevre and the upper Susa Valley in Italy on the slopes of the Sestriere Pass.
To peacefully enjoy the silence of the mountain, the colors of the larches, the trembling of the torrents and the blue sky, let's head towards the high Clarée valley. Névache more precisely.
Nevache is a village from another time, where stone houses are nestled against the church to protect themselves from the long snowy winters, at an altitude of over 1700 meters is the starting point for many hikes along the Clarée towards the Pointe des Cerces, but also towards the Etroite valley and Mont Thabor.
No houses, no hamlets, no human noise. In autumn, silence reigns in the forests.
The walk to the Ricou refuge will give you the feeling of crossing the Canadian highlands, so little is the human footprint.
To follow the progress of the russeting of the foliage around the refuge, at around 2100 meters above sea level, you can follow the webcam whose link is here.
La Vallée Etroite is very special. Indeed, while it is accessible on foot to all adventurers, the laziest will find a road blocked as soon as the first snow falls before the Col des Echelles. The particularity of this valley in French territory is that in winter it is only accessible from Italy, via the village of Bardonecchia.
Autumn is still a good season to reach the Etroite valley from Névache. The larch forests and mixtures of deciduous trees in this valley and the neighbouring Bardonecchia valley are very extensive and climb high up the mountain slopes, which gives these places a very spectacular landscape on a sunny day. The valley becomes flamboyant with a dominant yellow colour in the middle of which there are many red spots. A feast for the eyes.
Fall foliage in Queyras
It is no longer a valley, it is an entire region that is adorned with its most beautiful colors in autumn. Queyras is in fact a mountainous region composed of four large valleys radiating from a central focus, Fort Queyras.
Fort Queyras is at an altitude of 1400 metres and all the other centres of the four valleys, Arvieux, Aiguilles and Abriès, Molines en Queyras and Saint Véran and finally Ceillac are all at altitudes between 1600 and 2000 metres. These are therefore also high valleys, just like Bessans and Névache which were discussed in the previous paragraphs.
A climate even drier than Briançon, a high altitude, an orography which facilitates the establishment of forests and here the larch has found royal conditions to settle in.
It's hard to choose hiking routes because there is so much choice in Queyras. But at AlpAddict we love beautiful landscapes, so we're going to take two beautiful routes.
In the Ceillac Valley, the rise to Mirror Lake. As you can imagine, it is a lake in which the mountains that surround it are reflected. It is simply magical in any season, but of course in autumn the contrast between the red color of the vegetation, the blue of the sky and the white of the first snow is striking.
In the Abriès valley, we will choose the route that runs along and up the Guil to the small belvedere on Mont Viso. The less athletic can leave their vehicle at l'Echalp and only do the final part of the walk.
The landscape is rural and bucolic during the hike in a relatively flat and wide valley surrounded by high mountains. You can feel that there was a large glacier here a few thousand years ago.
To follow the evolution of the foliage in this valley, you can give a look at this webcam.
In this part of the Hautes Alpes, all the valleys become magical when the vegetation takes on its autumn colours. We have highlighted Queyras in this article, but the whole of Guillestrois is worth the trip.

Larch forests in autumn in the Ubaye Valley
As you will have understood, for a very colorful autumn, and resplendent larches, a dry climate and a high altitude are necessary. This is also the case for the valleys of the Upper Ubayand upstream of Barcelonnette and Jausiers. In reality, the Guillestrois occupies the northern flank and the Jausiers region the southern flank of the same mountainous region. The two valleys are separated by the Col de Vars.
The northern slopes of Ubaye are covered with a beautiful forest cover whose colors vary throughout the seasons.
Barcelonnette is the main small town of this large and wide valley and deserves a long stop to discover its unique history and in particular its “Mexican” villas. You will find an article by following this link.
On the road to the Col de Larche, the Ubayette valley, accessible from the pass or the village of Larche itself, leads via a beautiful hike to the Lauzanier lake. The autumnal colours of the larches at the start of the hike give way to meadows already reddened by the first frosts. We will appreciate the colour of the lake which has only the sky to reflect in the middle of a wide valley devoid of all vegetation. Open your eyes wide, you are in a Natural Park, it is already the Mercantour National Park.
To find out how autumn is progressing in Larche, you will find the webcam by following this link.
Further north, from Saint Paul sur Ubaye, you can go up the Ubaye valley to Maljasset and Maurin and walk towards the Parouart map, very wild and nevertheless very representative of the alpine geography of the southern French Alps.
This article cannot take into account all the specificities and all the beautiful forests of the French Alps. How can we ignore the colors of the Mercantour, Vercors, or the Tarentaise ? But a choice had to be made and this one fell on favorites that your faithful editor of AlpAddict has really gone through and whose beauty of autumnal colors he was able to admire with his own eyes.
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