Mont Blanc, 4809m
France, June 2024
For some time, I wanted to go on a mountain tour with my friend Luca from Switzerland, and in mid-May, we spoke on the phone to set a date. On that exact day, I spontaneously had an idea: Why not go to Chamonix and climb Mont Blanc on skis?
Two weeks later, after only two hours of sleep, I walked to the Innsbruck train station with a large backpack and my skis. Although skiing is the most normal thing here, you see it a bit less often at this time of year. It felt a bit strange, as it had been summer for a few weeks already.
The first stop on my journey was Zurich, where Luca picked me up, and we continued by car to Chamonix. It was a very cool feeling to be back there. It had been 13 years since I last visited Chamonix with my family for hiking. In the evening, we checked the conditions of Mont Blanc at the Office de Haute Montagne. Luckily, they were not bad, and the weather looked promising as well.
The next morning, we were at the Aiguille du Midi gondola at 7 am. The large gondola was full of other skiers, which I really hadn’t expected, but the still-good conditions at high altitude seemed to not be a secret. At the mid-station, we got off and were suddenly alone. Everyone else continued up to the Aiguille du Midi. We had top weather and clouds below us as we finally set off. Our goal for the first day was the Refuge de Grand Mulets, where we would spend the next two nights.
There wasn’t much snow at the 2,300 meters altitude where we started, so our tour began with the skis on our backpacks. We had to cross one glacial moraine after another. Eventually, it was finally possible to keep the skis on, and we reached the Glacier des Bossons. There, we roped up and, with the fog now setting in, crossed the beautiful ice landscape. At the key point of this route section (several large crevasses that we had to cross), we had to wait briefly. A few other rope teams were standing around a large crevasse, and a helicopter rescue was in full swing. Seen from our distance, it seemed like there had been a crevasse fall. Shortly after, we continued, heading straight towards these crevasses. The half-melted snow in June seemed not really trustable in some places, and crossing the crevasses was accompanied by a slight queasy feeling. Two snow bridges that we had to cross were just 25 to 30 cm thick. Fortunately, everything held, and we could tackle the final steep slope up to the hut. Once there, we were above the clouds again and had a clear blue sky. An incredible sight.
The Refuge de Grand Mulets is spectacularly located on a rock between two glaciers. On one side, you look deep down into huge crevasses, and in the afternoon, large ice masses from the seracs above us constantly thundered down onto the glacier. An indescribable natural spectacle.
The next morning, we left the hut just before 6 am. It was a very gray morning, but the high clouds made visibility not bad. The goal for this day was to scout the route to the summit and, if possible, reach 4,000 meters to acclimatize a bit. So we made our way to the north ridge of the Dôme du Goûter. This was also the route we wanted to take to the summit the next day. We climbed in increasingly tight switchbacks until it became too steep to continue with skis. We strapped them to our backpacks and swapped ski poles for ice axes. After gaining a few more meters on the steep, snowy ridge, we even encountered some bare ice, allowing us to use crampons and ice axes properly again. The Arête-Nord route was a lot of fun, and we were already looking forward to climb it again the next day on our summit push.
When the terrain flattened out again, we were enveloped in fog and a strong storm arose. After a few more minutes, we reached the summit of the Dôme du Goûter at an altitude of 4,304 meters. But as the weather was now quite uncomfortable, we didn’t spend a lot of time on this flat summit. We removed the skins from our skis and began the descent via the classic ski route for Mont Blanc (Petit and Grand Plateau). This route is spectacularly flanked by huge seracs on both sides and is therefore highly endangered to icefall. This is one reason why we took an alternative route up. However, during the descent, the risk of icefall is much lower as one travels much faster skiing down than during the ascent.
Since the sun had not yet shone all morning and it had snowed again during the night, we were able to enjoy the finest powder snow above 4,000 meters. Besides the joy of skiing and enjoying the landscape, we always maintained high concentration on navigation, as a labyrinth of crevasses lay before us, and we always tried to stay as far away from the seracs as possible. Exactly at noon, we arrived back at the hut and rested a bit for the summit day.
The summit day started early in the night. At 1:30 am, after a quick breakfast, we were on our skis and were the first to leave the hut. Above us was a clear starry sky, which, however, wouldn’t last long. In the darkness, it was a huge advantage that we could follow our tracks from the previous day and be sure we were on the right path. This made it much easier, especially since a strong snowstorm soon arose. In the light of our headlamps, we had about 3 to 4 meters of visibility, and in this snowstorm, we climbed the ridge, which seemed much longer to us than the previous day. Eventually, we left the bare ice passage behind and continued up a very steep, snow-covered slope. Around this time (shortly before 5 am), the first daylight appeared on the horizon, and suddenly we were above the clouds again. An amazing sight. We had already completed about 1,000 meters of ascent when we left the steep terrain behind and continued gently upward past the Dôme du Goûter towards Mont Blanc, which shone in the first sunlight before us.
Later, we reached the Refuge Vallot (a small emergency shelter) and took a short break before tackling the last 500 meters to the summit on the Bosses Ridge. We left our skis at the Refuge Vallot and set off on the final section. First steeply, then constantly up and down over several sub-summits of Mont Blanc. Suddenly, another bare ice section appeared before us. So on this last section, we used both ice axes again and were able to overcome the last key point without any problems. With perfect weather and an indescribable sea of clouds below us, we finally reached the highest point of the Alps after about 8 hours of ascent. An indescribable feeling.
We stayed on the summit for about 20 minutes, looking down at the snowy peaks emerging from the clouds everywhere, before starting the long descent. First back over the Bosses Ridge (where numerous other people were now coming up who had taken the normal route) to the Refuge Vallot, where we retrieved our skis and, as on the previous day, skied back to the hut over the plateaus. This time in bright sunshine. Although the snow quality was not as good as the day before, we had a great time skiing between the ice blocks and crevasses and looking down at the clouds still hanging in the valley below us. Back at the hut, we took a short break, packed our things, and continued the descent in now very poor snow conditions. The warm temperatures and direct sunlight made the snow soft and wet down to deep layers, making skiing very exhausting for us. When we reached the large crevasses, we found that the snow bridges we had crossed two days earlier no longer existed, but we found another way to get across. The next few hours were sheer drudgery. In the two days we had spent on the glacier, the snow on the lower part of the route had melted significantly, so we had to carry our skis for long stretches instead of skiing down comfortably. The numerous moraine crossings also demanded a lot from us at the end. However, we reached the mid-station of the Aiguille du Midi railway again after 16 hours of mountaineering. Our successful adventure came to an end.
