Mount Plauris

I’ve been thinking about this mountain for more than a decade at this point, for reasons I’m gonna explain later. I wanted to hike it a few weeks ago, but there was a raging wildfire not too far from it on a nearby mountain, so I had to wait. Wait for better air conditions, because hiking with ash and dust in the air is not a smart thing to do, but also wait for a colder day. Yesterday wasn’t exactly a cold day, it still got up in the 33° to 35°C range, but we—me and a friend—decided we were going for a hike anyway. We were out of the car at around 8:30 am and thankfully we got blessed with an overcast day which made the hike A LOT more enjoyable. This is one of those quintessential mountain hikes; if you look at the elevation profile, you start walking, you go up, and you keep going up till you basically reach the summit. There were pretty much no flat spots longer than maybe 10 meters, and there was only a brief downhill part because we had to go through a mountain pass before going…