Climbing Mt. Blanc

Mount Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe at more than15, 000 feet, dominates the landscape in Chamonix, a French alpine town. On a clear day it can easily be viewed from Switzerland and Italy.

I had come there in the early nineties to climb the mountain with my wife Vicki and a Chamonix Mountain Guide. We had arrived by train from northern Italy, where we had been hiking for a week in the Dolomites with Mountain/Travel Sobek, the adventure travel company. We were fit and ready to try Blanc.

Mountain Hut

Chamonix Mountain Guides are like professional athletes in the United States. Their training is long and arduous, and they command tremendous respect wherever they go in the mountains. The night before the two day climb we met our guide, who in contrast to Pierre, the guide who took us over the Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt years earlier, was mild mannered and quiet.

Guide and author

The first day we took a train partway up a flank of the mountain. We started hiking around noon through a boulder field that was steep and difficult. At one point we roped up and wore hard hats. The sun was hot, and I was getting very tired. Halfway up the route we came to a steep shoot. The crossing technique involved clipping onto a rope which traversed the steep snow and then inching one’s way across. There was an excitement to it all.

In late afternoon we reached our destination for the evening, a hut on the edge of the glacier leading to the summit of Mt. Blanc. The hut, which typically doesn’t turn anyone away, was packed. Though we had a reservation, which allowed us to have some space in a sleeping bin, we saw that many people did not. They stretched out on the floor or wherever they could find empty space.

To the WC

I slept fitfully that night as I was anxious about the climb and because a  young German man, who slept next to me, keep poking me in the head with his elbow in between his loud snores. At 1:00AM our guide woke us, and after hastily dressing, we put on crampons and head lamps before tying into the rope. The air was cold, and though other parties had started out at the same time, the distance between us made the night silent. All I could hear was the crunch of my boots on the hard snow. We had left at night so as to get the benefit of walking on frozen snow rather than the slush that came with the sunshine in the middle of the day. Night also reduced the danger of avalanche, since at that time the frozen snow wasn’t going to slide. The moon and stars were prominent. Parties of 6 or 7 people snaking up the frozen mountain on their ropes gave the scene an eerie quality.

On the summit

After many hours of climbing which wasn’t particularly difficult, we reached a knoll, where we put on out Gore-Tex suits. The wind was picking up, as we prepared to walk along a narrow ridge on the way to the summit. At seven in the morning I walked over a slight crest to the top of Europe. In the distance I could see Mount Paradiso in Italy and the Matterhorn in Zermatt. People from all over the world surrounded us, taking pictures and laughing in celebration... The air was very cold, so shortly we began our descent down the glacier on our way back to Chamonix.

Two days later we were settled in a beautiful hotel in Kanderstag, Switzerland. As I ate lunch by the pool, I looked up at the snow covered peaks behind our hotel in the mountains, and thought of future climbs and adventures in the high peaks of Western Europe.