Rousseau wrote in his Confessions , "I need torrents, rocks, pine trees, dark forests, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices at my elbow to give me a good fright", and he certainly found what he was looking for in the Alps . Formed by the collision of two continental plates two hundred million years ago, the range contains some of France's most dramatic landscapes, with roads, rail lines and population confined to the deep valley floors. To get the best out of this region you have to walk - or in winter, ski. There are four national or regional parks in this section of the website - Vanoise, Écrins, Queyras and Vercors - all with round-the-park trails, requiring one to two weeks' walking. The Tour of Mont Blanc path is of similar length. Then there are two transalpine routes: the Route des Grandes Alpes , which crosses all the major massifs from St-Gingolph on Lake Geneva to Nice, and Le Balcon des Alpes , a gentler, village-to-village itinerary through the western foothills.

All these routes are clearly marked, equipped with refuge huts and gîtes d'étape , and described in Topoguides . The CIMES office in Grenoble will provide information on all GR paths. In addition, local tourist offices often produce detailed maps of walks in their own areas. You should not undertake any high-level long-distance hikes , however, unless you are an experienced hill-walker; if you aren't, but nonetheless like the sound of some of these trails, read a specialized hiking book before making any plans, or simply limit your sights to more local targets. You can find plenty of day walks from bases in or close to the parks; and there are some spectacular road routes, too. The Vercors , Chartreuse , Aravis , Faucigny and Chablais areas are the gentlest and quietest introductions.

As for accommodation, you can camp freely on the fringes of the parks, but once inside you are supposed to pitch only in an emergency and move on after one night. Hotels are often seasonal (closed in late spring and late autumn), overbooked and overpriced - if you're on a budget but don't want to carry camping equipment, using gîtes and refuges is a better solution. The Alps are as crowded in midsummer as they are in winter (the Chamonix-Mont Blanc area is the worst black spot), but you are more or less obliged to go in high season if you want to walk: unreliable weather aside, anywhere above 2000m will be snowbound until the beginning of July. Drivers should remember that some high passes such as the Col du Galibier and the Col de l'Iseran in the east of the region can remain closed well into June, requiring long detours or excursions into Italy via Alpine tunnels.

The handful of towns in the Alps offer good facilities for campers and hikers, and often provide attractions of their own. Grenoble is the economic and intellectual capital of the region, and has a lively student population and plenty of nightlife; Chambéry and picturesque Annecy are both good bases for expeditions into the Massif de Chartreuse and the countryside around the Lac d'Annecy respectively, though the former is rather dull and the latter suffers from overcrowding; and Briançon , the highest town in Europe, is close to the Écrins and Queyras parks.