Climbing Mont Blanc
My brother and me, we like adventure, and we like mountains. We had this project to one day climb Mont Blanc and just decided to go for it in 2015. We booked a guide with Roc Odyssée and settled for september.
The price was quite high as we booked a 4 days course, around 1’600 EUR per person.
I arrived at Geneva by train from Zürich and then took a shuttle to chamonix. By night I was comfortably settled in a small chalet and ready to start wandering around the next day.
We spent the first day on the Mer de Glace, a big glacier where we did an ice school. Familiatizing ourselves with the crampons, the ice axes and how to walk on ice, climb walls and generally feel comfortable with those blades on our foots and a war axe in our hands.
The next day we start to climb. We take the mechanical lift called “Houches”. We then board the Mont Blanc train and get out at “nid d’aigle”, 2372m of altitude. We first start to climb on an easy track, surrounded by Alpine ibex (Chamois) and slowly make our way to the Tête rousse refuge at 3200m.
From there, we put on the crampons and the rope and then climb the Goûter route up to the goûter refuge at 3835m. The way is splendid, the weather is good and we like the scrambling through the rocks.
Only one passage is quite dangerous, where you actually cross the gouter route couloir, every now and then you hear and you see rocks going down. You don’t want to get hit by such a falling rock.
When we reach the gouter refuge we are exhausted. We have climbed +1563m today with our backpacks, around 6 hours of continuous uphill scrambling. But we are also happy, the refuge is beautiful and we are happy to get a nice beer and a hot plate of spaghetti before going to sleep. The next day we are supposed to wake up at 3 in the morning and start our climb to the summit at 4810m.
We meet some peculiar people along the way, including a german climbing in a t-shirt with tongs.
We have some troubles to sleep as the altitude is taking its toll. But finally we lay down and nap a bit.
When we wake up at 3, the wind is blowing, blizzard conditions outside and overall shitty weather forecast. Our guide tells us that we have to wait it out. We wait we wait but in the end the weather is hopeless and we have sadly to turn back. The descent is fun as the conditions are totally different from the previous day, we feel in the middle of an adventure. We are nevertheless very disapointed to not summit the mountain.
We reach our chalet end of the afternoon and get some sleep. We have one more day on site and tomorrow our guide is taking us to do some rock climbing. We have fun climbing but we cannot get rid of the bitterness oh having to turn back when all was going so well. I suppose it was “only” mont blanc and not an himalayan summit though, so better here than there !
And here is a video of our adventure :
