Mont Blanc
Sea to summit
The Riviera
�AU PIED?� Our sea to summit trip on Mont Blanc will always be intrinsically associated in my mind with these two words, which mean �by foot� in French and which were voiced variously by fellow randonneurs in tones of admiration (well, once), disbelief (more often), concern (frequently), and, most commonly of all, pity.
These were, however, not the first words with which the trip was associated. The stinking hot weather at the mediterranean coastal town of Mentone and the start of a track, an 1100m climb straight up a waterless limestone hill in 30 degree heat and 90 per cent humidity, meant other words came to the fore.
Among the printable ones were �brutal�, �hot� and �flies�. For a trip pictured as a Heidi-esque alpine ramble in the guidebooks, it was like going to the cinema to see The Sound of Music but finding you had walked into one showing The Black Hole of Calcutta by mistake.
Even getting to Mentone had been challenging enough. After being an illegal overstayer in Britain for three years, working as a journalist in the Royal Courts of Justice in London where my duties included covering, er, immigration appeals, one of the biggest hurdles of climbing Mont Blanc from sea to summit was likely to be just getting into France without being deported.
As an Australian, I needed a visa and, as an overstayer, I couldn�t apply for one. Fortunately France and Belgium were among a group of central European Union countries to do away with internal immigration controls so all I had to do was get to Brussels and then cross the control-free border into France from there.
The French restaurants believed
in truth in advertising
I sailed through British controls without a comment, boarded the midnight ferry to Ostend and, a few hours later, was breathing a sigh of relief to finally be in a country with the knowledge and acquiescence of the authorities. Or so I thought, until the Belgian official looked at my passport and motioned me into a room to one side with that calm tone which officials use when they know they�re going do something you won�t like but don�t want to tip you off just yet. Sure enough I was grilled about my intentions, the answers to which clearly failed to please them, and was told to sit with a group of other miscreants of Belgian immigration. One of my fellow detainees was not too keen on this turn of events and legged it through a side door, pursued by officials who were clearly built for comfort rather than speed. A few minutes later, he was brought back to the office, by which time the sweating officials had concluded that by comparison I was unlikely to bring down the European Union if allowed into their country. With a nod, I was freed.
The best part of 12 hours later, my train pulled into Nice a few hours before Sarah�s flight - she was the smug holder of a British passport - arrived. The next day, we were enjoying the beau monde of a Riviera restaurant, which included a section of private beach and even private water, since this and the other eateries had used lines of white bouys to demarcate a rectangle of water extending 20 metres or so out from their beach. After lunch we waded out into this economically-exclusive tepid Mediterranean water to fulfill the ``sea�� part of the journey, even going so far as to duck our heads underwater so that some stickler could not accuse us of failing to do the full sea to summit.
Even delaying our departure until 6pm was not enough to mitigate the effects of the heat as we sweated our way through the back streets of Mentone. The brutal, hot and fly-ridden nature of the walk that evening was not necessarily a bad thing thought since the first two helped ameliorate the effects of my onerous quality-control duties as chairman of the Alpine Club�s wine committee - AC-speak for volunteer barman on lecture nights at the club�s London base. As for the flies, it was a good thing that Sarah got used to the slow and dumb French variety before taking on their less-swattable and more numerous Australian siblings. The limestone landscape precluded the chance of any streams from which to refill our waterbottles so it was two tired and thirsty campers who arrived at a spring on the far side of the mountain and found an old olive grove to set up their first camp.
On the days which followed, we quickly learned to take our cues from the surroundings. On the steep uphills we ground slowly upwards like the articulated trucks we had seen tackling the hills of the motorway above Mentone. As the mercury climbed each morning and afternoon, we dressed on a par with the beachgoers. Best of all, we always made a point of observing the siesta during the hottest part of the day and then trying to find a campsite before the regular evening rains arrived. The countryside was just stunning and, in contrast to the teeming hordes on the beaches, it was well into our second day before we saw anyone else on the tracks.
Odd too that considering the thousands who make the Tour du Mont Blanc seem at times to be like being part of an endless supermarket checkout queue except with 4000m peaks instead of magazine racks, none of them came here to soak up untouched sections of a region which is generally loved to death because of its own attractiveness. It was the same with the mountains, which featured soaring slabs of granite and limestone which screamed out the prospect of fabulous rock climbing routes but which had probably never been touched, which was something of a contrast to the overpopulated crags of Chamonix.
The mountains we were following formed the natural boundary between France and Italy which, given the tenor of European history, meant that almost every eyrie along the way featured bunkers, pillboxes, rusting reels of barbed wire and other accoutrements of wars long since past. There was no forgetting which side of the mountains we were on though because everything was quintessentially French in a way that either delights or infuriates. Getting directions was a good example. Unlike my French, which was of a style which would make Tarzan wince, Sarah had spent a lot of her childhood in Brussels and spoke the language well. But when she would ask the direction to this town or another, whoever we asked, male or female, would then turn to me and babble away about ``premiere droite�� and ``troiseme gauche��, to which I enacted that essential jounalistic skill known as adopting an expression of total cognition while understanding nothing and hoping Sarah was taking this down.
For the first week we had to climb and descend around 1000 metres each day as the track followed a roller coaster route, usually along old donkey trails which earlier this century would have been the only means of transport to these mountain villages. The hills were hard work but the villages were frequent and at each one we gave in to our abject inability to walk past a pattisserie or cafe without going inside.
By the end of that week, we arrived at a town in time for our siesta and spread out the three maps plotting our route from the coast to Mont Blanc, only to find that we had barely covered half of the first map. We�d given ourselves a month before I was due back in London to fly out to go mountain biking with friends in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Armenia. This sobering realisation meant that at our current rate we wouldn�t even reach Mont Blanc before we ran out of time, let alone climb the thing.
The walk was still fun so we carried on anyway and then an amazing and unwitting transformation happened - we got fit. Understandably this didn�t come as a bolt from above but rather a gradual realisation that the scenery had been rehabilitated from brutal to beautiful, and the hills had transformed from being work to being fun.
The distances we covered grew commeasurately and by the time we arrived in the walled city of Briancon, the half way mark, we were back on schedule to do the full sea to summit. We headed to a supermarche to stock up on food and wine for a big feed that night before having a salubriously distanceless day to do washing, have our first hot shower in days, and attend to all the other mundane necessities of life. Fate had other ideas though and the water supply at the camp proved to be dodgy, with indelicately explosive results for Sarah in the middle of the night. The rest day turned into a recuperation day but at least my bowels were used to the slings and arrows of outrageous hygiene and I was able to tend to her rather than testing that famous womanly claim that all men turn into simpering and pathetic wrecks when sick.
The following day, she hitched a ride with someone else in the campground to the next town, while I walked the section. The guidebook showed the route heading around a bluff but just above I could see the rungs and cables of a via ferrata heading straight up the cliff. That was too hard to resist so I headed straight up, overtaking clients of some adventure tourism business who were doing it with safety ropes and maximum caution. I greeted them with ``C�est le GR5, oui?�� but nobody believed it.
With Sarah again, we continued along. The paths were now getting a little busier and we started running into more people. One was Pierre, who when not on dry land was an extreme French solo sea kayaker. He too had started at the Mediterranean - all the other long distance walkers on the Grand Randonnee Cinq started at Chamonix, thinking I suppose that there was 1200m less climbing if you went to the sea - but was heading somewhere near Geneva and subsisting purely on freeze-dried meals which some sponsor had provided on an earlier venture. Brave boy, although we suspected the diet was going to be a bigger hurdle than his route. There was also an American couple who made us seem like Sunday strollers by walking from the Hook of Holland, an inconceivably long distance away and in a country not noted for its alpine scenery, and were heading to somewhere near Florence.
The number of people increased exponentially when we hit the Tour du Mont Blanc walkway, an understandably popular outing for the British on holiday to the point where �Ee by gum� or some other regional Englishism proved to be rather more likely a greeting as �Bon jour�. Our route took us in the opposite direction of these masses so we felt like salmon swimming upstream until we got the top of the telepherique above Les Houches.
This was the start of the route up Mont Blanc and for which we would need the climbing gear we had stored with a friend in Argentiere, a little up the valley. We had looked forward to this moment for a very long time because it meant we could catch the telepherique and then buses to the fleshpots of the Chamonix valley, enjoying for the first time in weeks a pace faster than five kilometres an hour and requiring no effort. Again fate played a hand and we just missed the last cablecar, finding ourselves instead walking - now that was familiar - down to Les Houches.
BY NOW we were getting cocky and talking about climbing the mountain then continuing the walk all the way to the end of the GR5 at Lake Leman near Geneva. We should have known. Loaded down with the plastic boots, ice axes, crampons and all the other equipment for the mountains, we went back up the telepherique then walked alongside the cog railway to the top station. Once again giving in to the siren call of cafe au lait at the station cafe, we then joined the throng of would-be summiteers plugging our way upwards towards the Gouter Hut at about 3800m, from which we would head for the summit.
Well, that was the plan but the weather had other ideas. It began to rain and we headed instead to the Tete Rousse hut at 3200m with the plan of heading up the next day. That night we were entertained with a spectacle of rain, hail, snow and sleet, so that by the time the clouds parted briefly the next morning, the route above was covered in snow then the clouds came in and the show began anew.
I�ve always been susceptible to cabin fever and it was no different here. I read the hut logbook�s English entries, added one for our sea to summit venture, looked at the weather, got bored, and then started going to the logbook�s French entries.
That�s when two Dutch guys, Frans and Hermann, turned up. It should be said this was in August 1995 and the French Government had just announced the resumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific, unleashing protests and boycotts. We�d thought about changing our route from the coast and go on the Italian side of the border and then climbing one of the Italian routes on Mont Blanc but decided it was too difficult.
On Mont Blanc itself, Greenpeace had put a camp high on the Vallee Blanche to protest against the French decision but they had been removed because they had apparently not gained a permit to stage a protest on the mountain.
We chatted to Frans and Herman, who eventually confided that they were part of an undercover Greenpeace team which was going to take an anti-nuclear banner to unfurl on the summit. We immediately agreed to help.
By the following day, conditions had improved sufficiently for the four of us to head up to the Gouter hut and we arrived around lunchtime, just as climbers who had got to the top were returning to the hut. The afternoon then settled into the familiar process of carbo-loading, getting our gear ready for a 2am start, trying to sleep, cursing the middle-aged walrus snoring right next to you, and finally getting up in a cranky mood without having had any sleep.
The weather looked a bit dodgy but everyone headed out and followed a snow route upwards, where I tried to convince myself that the snow blasting us from the east was windblown powder from the last storm rather than the screamingly obvious fact that it was new snow from a storm taking place as we climbed. This mass delusion continued until we got to the Vallot Refuge, which is seen variously as an emergency shelter for climbers caught in a storm or free accommodation for penny-pinching alpinists, and we wisely opted to head inside to wait for the weather to improve. It didn�t and we formed a great sheep-like group of about 50 climbers who tried to navigate our way back to the Gouter Hut in a whiteout.
This was a lot easier said than done since the lower slopes are remarkably featureless but for anyone who has climbed in Scotland in winter, such conditions are par for the course and it was heartening to hear a welcome Scottish accent among the people routefinding at the front of the group. Even then it wasn�t easy and after a zig-zagging path down the hill we were just in the process of navigating our way into a large crevasse when the clouds cleared momentarily and we could see the spur leading to the hut just over to our left. It would have been nearly impossible to find without that sight but a couple of yells of �A�gauche� later, we were heading for home.
After that salutary experience, we sat sipping hot chocolates for the rest of the day, which of course cleared up into a perfect sunny conditions and ended with a spectacular sunset over a sea of clouds.
Once again, we resumed our places next to the walrus to feign sleep until 2am rolled around again. Conditions were a little better this time but still not ideal and Sarah, Frans, Hermann and I headed up again to the Vallot hut to assess the situation.
Most people again turned back but I had a shameless attack of summit fever by this point and urged my reluctant companions to continue. They did, for another 10 minutes then stopped to reassess. Once more they were urged to continue and after they stopped again in another 10 minutes, I untied from the rope and said I was heading on alone. I�d never had summit fever before - my philosophy had always been that the summit will still be there next year and my job is to make sure I was too - but I underestimated the psychological impact of spending 28 days heading towards a goal.
The others wisely but futilely tried to dissuade me then headed back. There were only about eight of us still continuing, including one guided party, and we went on past the razorback bosses ridge then stood around for another 20 minutes waiting to see what the weather was going to do. Given I was now on my own I thought it would be prudent to stick with them. Finally the guide decided it was on and I plugged steps up to the summit.
I�d been here twice before, via the Cosmiques route and the Brenva Spur, and each time was rewarded with clear blue skies and 50 to 100 people. Not this time and I had the rare experience of making new steps in the snow on the summit, waited for the others to arrive then asked one of them to a summit photo which, in terms of view, could just as easily have been taken directly outside the Gouter Hut�s door.
This was our 29th day of the sea to summit trip and reaching the summit took our cumulative height gain since the Mediterranean to 28,030 metres - or three Everests from sea to summit with Ben Nevis on top for good measure.
Impressive statistics or not, it wasn�t a time to linger so I headed down. The trouble was that by now it was light enough to need sunglasses but wearing them affected my ability to follow the line of tracks I needed to follow back to the hut and to pick up the undulations which may show hidden crevasses below. As paradoxes go, it was not a good one. In the end, I chose to leg it down the hill and managed to make it back to the Gouter Hut before suffering snow blindness.
After that, it was a matter of gathering our gear and heading down the valley for hot showers, cold beer, and thick air.
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