Villair - Col Sapin - Tête de la Tronche - Rifugio Bertone - Villair

A circular hike from the parking lot above villair. First we went uphill on the street that leads towards some tiny villages, deep into the valley. This part is marked as trail 43 and the trail is easy to follow.

By the village of Tsapy the trail turns right into the forest and goes from now on quite steep uphill. The trail goes in serpentines up a foresty mountainside, till you come to a little pass at about 2000m. From here you can already see the peak of Tête de la Tronche, the highest point of this day.
You continue, now pretty much on the same level, over a scree slope and some older landslides. You will also pass over a smaller river that has no bridge.

Now the main ascent willl start and in a rather short distance you will cover the ~400 height meters that take you to the Col Sapin. This part is steep and there are no more trees, I´m not sure if I would be comfortable walking up here in really bad weather. The ground could possibly become quite slippery?

Once you are at the Col Sapin the way splits and you continue to the left (now on trail 42), very steep up the last part towards the peak. I do have vertigo and I wasn't absolutely comfortable with this bit. Once you are past the peak it goes downhill towards the next peak, the Testa Bernarda. Here you can decide if you want to walk over the top or not, I decided not to. The trail goes most of the time over a ridge, with the grassy mountain sides falling down rather steep on both sides. Again: If you have a lot of vertigo, this is not so nice. But it's really not dangerous as long as the visibilty is reasonable.

From after the testa Bernarda the trail gets easier and it basically is a soft grassy trail that goes smoothly downhill. This changes close to the Rifugio bertone, where the trail is really steep and sandy again. The last 500m before the refuge are quite slippery. After Bertone the trail enters the forest again and covers the last 700 heightmeters down to the parking. It's quite a harsh downhill when you're already tired in your knees.

All in all an amazing hike with incredible views over the Mont Blanc Massif!
It says by the sign on the parking that it's supposed to take 7 hours, for us it was 6 hours with breaks.
The difficulty is "randonée alpine" and I found it to be not too hard, but a lot of height meters to be covered and some parts that can make you feel a bit dizzy if you have strong vertigo.