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#36: Mont Blanc, France: 19-20 June 2023

bertrand006

Updated: Oct 19, 2024

The Mont Blanc experience proved a suspicion I’d had for a while. Julie Hernandez and Dave Covill (President of the Highpointers Foundation) are far more intent on getting me to the summits of certain mountains than I am, and their assessment of my climbing ability may be outdated.

 

For almost a year, Julie had talked about my visiting her in Chamonix and our climbing Mont Blanc. In the abstract, it sounded great. Besides, Julie certainly knew my hiking ability (and limits) as well as anyone. She lined up Dimitri Escoffier, a guide whom she’d met the previous year, to take us up Mont Blanc for what was to be a 3-day, 2-night excursion. The plan was to climb 2-3 hours the first day to the Refuge de Tête Rousse, catch a few hours of sleep, start at 3 am the second day for another two hours to the Refuge de Goûter, then push on 4 more hours to the summit, before descending back to the Refuge de Goûter on the second night. Day 3 would be the rest of the descent.


 

The trip started with an idyllic one-hour train ride starting from La Fayet on a small cog train that crawled its way up the mountain to Nid d’Aigle (Eagle’s Nest), the final station en route to Mont Blanc. In mid-June, there was still considerable snow on the mountain, even at the lower levels. We set off from the train station for a climb through fields of slushy snow, with intermittent piles of rock and stone.



Dimitri was a very patient guide, giving good advice as I gingerly inched my way up the mountain. The stretch called Payot Ridge that verged on technical climbing was especially challenging. As we completed those three hours, it was clear to all (especially me) that I didn’t have the speed or skill to go beyond the first lodge. The  degree of difficulty would be far greater, the higher one got on the mountain. I had no problem with sleeping a second night at the first refuge, while Dimitri and Julie continued up the mountain.


 

 The Refuge de Tête Rousse was a lodge with the basics: unisex dormitory-style rooms with 6 sets of bunk beds per room; a dining room with bar at doubled as a common area; and a locker room to storing boots and extra hiking gear. No wifi connection. Breakfast and dinner were served family style, with each guide and his clients grouped around a table. Julie commented on the sex ratio: approximately 10 to 1. And not much grey hair in the crowd.

 

Dimitri joined the other guides before dinner on the first evening to share what they knew about conditions on the mountain. The weather reports were not favorable; the forecast called for extreme wind for the next two days. Soon there was disappointed murmuring that no one would be summitting in that 24-48-hour period. Different groups convened with their respective guides to make a game plan: try to cross the treacherous Couloir de Goûter (with the ever-present risk of falling rocks and ice), then continue up the technically difficult Goûter buttress en route to the second lodge, where the reported winds were 70-80 mph; or accept defeat and head down. Julie agreed with Dimitri that crossing the couloir and getting above the buttress, which were the crux of the Mont Blanc climb, would be a solid learning experience in preparation for a future attempt. To do so, they would need to start at 4 am.

 

 

After a dinner of vegetable soup, lentils and sausage, and local pudding, we headed to bed early. Julie had negotiated with a team of Dutch hikers for me to get a lower bunk, sparing me the acrobatics required to get down from the top one. As the sun went down, the wind picked up. It howled relentlessly, battering the walls of the refuge. How, I wondered, could any human being avoid being swept down the mountainside by that force of wind, let alone climb a technically difficult portion of the mountain?

 

Around 3:50 am, I awoke from under my cozy down comforter, wind continuing to howl outside. It defied imagination that anyone would want to voluntarily submit themselves to that degree of discomfort. Just then, Julie began to stir as she crawled out of her bed next to me and gathered her belongings for the climb. One word kept turning over in my mind: “intrepid.”

 

I joined a later shift for breakfast. Several other groups had headed out at 4 am to test their might against the mountain. Those left in the refuge were groups of frustrated climbers, still weighing their options. For two French guys in their 40s, it was the fourth time they had gotten this far and had to abandon their dream of summiting Mont Blanc. A British woman of Indian descent – who later befriended me – recounted her sad tale of having gotten food poisoning the night before the climb. She managed to make it to the Refuge de Tête Rousse and felt sure that she’d be fine after a good night’s sleep. She was devastated when her guide refused to let her continue onward with the group. In contrast to my own situation (loving just being along for the ride), she had invested large sums of money and considerable emotional capital in making it to the summit of Mont Blanc.


 

Dimitri and Julie had concocted Plan A and Plan B. Plan A consisted of their climbing from the Refuge de Tête Rousse, across the Couloir de Goûter and up the Goûter buttress, to reach the Refuge de Goûter. They would then assess the chance to do more climbing on the mountain, though the summit was out of the question. They would sleep the second night at the Refuge de Goûter, then pass by on Day 3 to pick me up for the descent. 


 

 Plan B was predicated on the probable nasty weather they would encounter as they pushed up the mountain on Day 2. They would climb to the Refuge de Goûter (same arduous route), revive themselves with some hot tea and snacks, then head back down to the first refuge by 10 am. They’d collect me and we’d start down the mountain, in hopes of reaching the station in time to make the 12:10 pm train. As the weather reports went from bad to worse on the first evening, Dimitri admitted that “it’s 75% sure we’ll be back to pick you up by 10 am and head down.”

 

On cue, at 10:05 am on Day 2, Dimitri and Julie walked into the dining hall. I was packed but hadn’t realized the tight schedule we’d now be on. Dimitri had learned from another guide that there was still enough snow on one of the trails down to allow for glissading – sliding on one’s butt in a path created by a previous climber or the guide. Sledding without the sled. I had done this a couple of times before, and I greatly preferred it to the alternative of clomping down step-by-step through wet snow. The descent would consist of glissading down some 8 to 10 stretches of 100+ yards each, interspersed with walking across slushy snow or finding firmer footing on exposed rocks and scree.


 

The first several runs went great. I could hardly believe my good luck at being part of something that was so much fun. Yet on the next glissade, I picked up too much speed and lost control. Dimitri, a superbly skilled guide, jumped in my path to break my downward slide as I headed toward a patch of rock. As we made contact, I fell through the snow into a chest-high crevasse created by the weight and force of my fall. As my chest collided with a rim of hard-packed snow, I felt a sharp “pop” or “ping” around my heart. “What was that?” I briefly wondered. As I moved my arms and legs around, I was quite sure that nothing was broken; in fact, nothing even hurt, except my pride for finding myself in a crevasse. Julie, having watched this drama unfold from her position above me on the mountain, feared the worst. She raced to the crevasse, where Dimitri was working to pull me out. Once on my feet, I again assessed that nothing seemed broken. I couldn’t manage to take a deep breath without a pressing sensation on my chest, but I attributed that to being stunned by the whole incident. I brushed off the snow and we started down. We had that train to catch.

 


Not 15 minutes later, we found ourselves at another dicey juncture, which could have spelled trouble had Dimitri not been there to catch me before I started another downward chute. Having averted that mishap, we continued the race downward, alternating with glissading (where I had now focused on maintaining control) and hiking across the non-snowy parts. We reached the train station with 10 minutes to spare.

 

 

Back at the house, Julie mentioned several times how traumatized she was by my “falling in the hole.” She was clearly worked up over this mishap. My own philosophy was that if nothing bad had happened, why bother to be traumatized? (There was no mention of the 45 minutes it took her to dig herself out of her own snow crevasse in Nepal four years ago.) When she brought it up a third time, I replied, “Julie, you do risky things all the time and don’t give it a second thought. So why the big fuss over my falling in the hole?” Without missing a beat, she replied, “Jane, if something happens to me, everyone just chalks it up to Julie’s foolishness. But if something happens to you, everyone will think it’s my fault.” She might have had a point.


 

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