Le Crapahut des Dahuts

One day of great tiredness, God mixed up the brushes and completely cracked 🤪. After creating living beings of every kind, his imagination went haywire and he invented something totally incongruous: the dahut! Adapted to mountainous regions, like the one in La Côte d’Arboz, in Haute-Savoie, in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the dahut is a creature with two legs shorter than the other two 🦄. Can you feel the trick coming? 😂 Not the forelimbs like a kangaroo, but the left- or right-legged ones (depending on its subspecies 😌), which condemns it to walk only in the same direction relative to the slope (otherwise it falls! 🫠). This animal is ultra rare and the subject of a very peculiar, almost legendary hunt... It would live in the Alps, at high altitude, exactly at the same places where they want to take you aboard. Be careful if someone offers to catch it in a burlap sack… you might end up being the duck joke! 🦃

Well, that being said, this isn’t about hunting the dahut that you’re invited to Jean-Luc Pottier, a trail pioneer in France and organizer of the Crapahut des Dahuts. It’s more about a quirky race – a bit like the creature that gives the event its name – that invites you: an epic multi-day trail with star-shaped routes and a bivouac 🏕 at the base camp of the Col de l’Encrenaz 🚩. And to trek, you’ll trek ! With 170 km and 9500 mD+ on the menu, you’ll quickly get the wobbling gait of the imaginary creature that drives the most credulous people crazy! 🐐 Created in 1990, this challenge was more of a raid than a trail: it lasted 7 days and went from village to village. Runners carried all their gear, pitched and struck their tent each day… in short, it really broke three legs off a duck! 😅 Stopped in 2000, this fairly infernal race came back to life in 2022 in a small committee to better prepare the 2023 edition. This year, only 200 happy few will have the choice to start solo, in pairs 🔗 or in a 4-person team to traverse the mountains and the preserved nature of the range of the Alpes. An ideal experience to disconnect for several days 🗓. You’ve guessed it: you need to be in excellent physical shape to take on this big challenge. But don’t panic, there is still one important detail that can change everything for you: the race can be run AND walked ! Feeling reassured, right? 😅

Relax, in this story there will be no victims like in the dahut hunt (the victim is not the beast, but the beast that believed in the existence of the animal, haha!). The game will simply be to endure a mighty dose of physical and mental effort over 4 days, knowing that you can recharge every evening at the campsite 😮‍💨. Entirely managed by the organization, this base camp will be the high point of sociability, team spirit and sharing 🫶. A roadmap will be handed to you each evening during the briefing for the next day’s stage and the route will be marked on an IGN map 🗺. Well, did you think everything would be easy? Don’t try to outsmart the system because control points will dot the course to prevent you from taking shortcuts 🤥.

If you finish, you’ll have the immense joy of completing an extraordinary adventure. True, without capturing the legendary dahut, but having had the honor of treading the same trails as it! 🍀