Le Vernet - Some looked skyward, while others seemed only able to look to the ground as they walked with arms linked.
But most fixed their eyes on the snow-capped Col de Mariaud - the forbidding Alpine peak behind which lay the remains of their loved ones and those of the man who seemingly killed them.
It was a pilgrimage of grief whose participants had set out on Thursday morning in the belief that the passengers on board flight 4U 9525 were most likely to have perished in a devastating accident.
Yet as their families arrived by afternoon in their hundreds in the village closest to the isolated mountain ravine where the Germanwings Airbus A320 was obliterated on Tuesday morning, they found themselves gazing from afar on a scene not only of appalling loss but also one of presumed mass murder.
The relatives had flown in from Dusseldorf and Barcelona, the arrival and departure points of the destroyed flight, and joined others converging from some of the countries whose citizens - schoolchildren, infants, mothers and fathers - died as the passenger jet hit the ground.
As they touched down on French soil, they were informed in a private briefing by Brice Robin, the magistrate leading the investigation, that the figure of 150 passengers and crew who had died was now starkly divided: 149 victims and one presumed killer, the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who the evidence now showed had deliberately set 4U 9525 on its descent to destruction.
And so it was, while absorbing that appalling knowledge, that the group of around 400 made their journey into the lower reaches of the French Alps to be near to their dead.
Jean Francois, one of the small army of volunteers from the local populace who had stepped forward to help with services from translation to food, shook his head in disbelief as the news of an apparent murder-suicide leapt ahead of the convoy and reached Le Vernet.
He said: “To do such a thing is to me unthinkable. How much suffering can we ask these families to take? They must be numb with anger.”
The inhabitants of this wild, beautiful corner of France have reacted instinctively with humanity and warmth to the tragedy in their midst.
The residents of Le Vernet, a village of precisely 150 souls, offered their homes and holiday apartments to accommodate the families.
A makeshift chapel, bedecked with flowers and tributes offered by villagers, has been opened in an annexe to the Le Vernet's school and library.
And as the families stepped down from the fleet of seven coaches that nosed their way along the rough track at the mountain's base, they were greeted by an honour guard of Gendarmes holding up the flags of the departed - confirmation in national colours of a disaster of international dimensions.
But the solemnity and the solidarity of the locals could only stand alongside the raw grief that was apparent as the column of the bereaved, flanked by carers in fluorescent tabards, walked to a meadow to be shown the point in the distance, hidden by a thicket of peaks, where the wreckage of so many lives was to be found.
A teenager held her arm around an older woman as they walked leaning into one another. Ahead, a single woman appeared to hold a handkerchief to her face.
Later, a second smaller convoy appeared carrying the relatives of the flight crew.
The family of Andreas Lubitz were absent.
Josephine Balique, a Le Vernet native who had travelled home from her studies in Aix en Provence to offer assistance, told The Independent: “It is important for us to be here for these families, to offer them what we can, to explain what we can. We have a responsibility towards them.”
It was probably a forlorn hope but as one resident put it: “These families are surely facing unimaginable darkness. We can only hope that what they suffer is eased in some small way by the solidarity of others.”
The Independent