April 11, 2011, Mont Blanc, North Ridge Sufferfest

I'm posting this mostly at the request of Silas so he can find my trip report later when he goes to ski this someday.  However, I hope you all enjoy and can sometime ski this great pinnacle of the Alps.


After about 3 weeks of skiing here in Chamonix, I found 2 partners who were willing to rope up with me and enjoy the sufferfest of summitting and skiing Mont Blanc via the Grand Mullets hut approach.  This is well known as the most classic ski route on Mont Blanc, though the most preferred route is via the traverse and to ski all 3 summits of the Mont Blanc massif, this is not in this year.  The €œNormal Route€ as it€™s known won€™t be guided by the local french guides due to the extreme risk of both serac fall and crevasse hazard.  My pictures should make it clear that although the route is not extremely technically challenging (some short sections of no fall turns and ice over exposed slopes), the danger of this route is high.  So I do fully understand why both the hostel owner and others I€™d met locally had some concerns when I told them my interest in skiing this route.  This route is of course in very bad shape this year due to the unseasonably warm termperatures and low amount of snow in the Alps.  However, what is life without a bit of spice  ;D?

Day 1: Approach from Plan de l€™Aiguille

We left pretty early from the Midi station, catching the tram at about 830am.  The way to the bosson glacier from here is reasonably clear, we stayed pretty high and bootpacked and skinned on ice hard spring frozen snow.  Apparently I was the only one who decided to bring ski crampons for this part of the trip.  Kristy described her affinity for these snow conditions as €œplease shoot me in the face€ as we skinned and traversed on super hard sometimes breakable crust to the entrance of the Bosson glacier.
We roped up here and skinned past hole after hole and over snow bridge over snow bridge over to the foot of the corridor beneath the Grand Mullets hut.  It was fairly uneventful save me cussing out a frenchman when he skiied up and nearly crossed ropes with me in the very delicate exit from the icefall and crevasse field (we later cussed at each other some more and then made friends at the Mullets hut later in the day).

There€™s a rather fun rock scramble from the glacier to the hut which is about 30 meters off the snow on top of the prow.  We brought our own dinner with stoves and all to the hut and enjoyed the wonderful views and super sunny day from the deck and went to bed at about 7pm for a 1:30am departure for the summit.

Day 2: Summit Sufferfest

We got off to a slightly late start, 1:45am with an intended summit time of 930am.  The ascent from the hut is 1760m (5775 ft) and we needed to do about 220m an hour ( about 720ft/hr).  Looking back now and thinking about that pace and the altitude €œsufferfest€ was definitely a good description.  The first 500m of the route is a pretty straightforward skin track.  You just have to make sure you cross the rockband low enough so that you don€™t end up going up the normal route and instead make your way towards the north shoulder of the gouter ridge.  Ascending this way is the best because you entirely avoid all the seracs and the vast number of crevasses.  The only difficulty is that it€™s exposed and rather unrelenting for about 400 meters.
The shoulder itself is about 45 degrees the entire way, with a step or two of 60 degrees.  If you are lucky (as we were) you might hear chunks of the serac falling off to your left.  There were some portions of quite hard ice on this climb as well which made it extra spicey for about 20ft in a couple of spots when you could no longer bury a pick more than a cm.  The steps were all pretty well cut in and it didn€™t feel sketchy enough to place a screw, so we pushed on with one break for the entire climb.  In hindsight, I should have taken another break somewhere and pounded some more food as I started to crash pretty hard when we finally topped out the boot pack and started skinning. We stopped, Kristy took the rescue rope to lighten my load for a bit and I pounded some food and was feeling a lot stronger about an hour later.

Somewhere in my haste and altitude haze I used my ice axe instead of my whippet to switch my dynafit speeds into locked in touring mode.  It was now about 6am and balls cold at almost 4000 meters.  You can probably guess what happened when I took my aluminum ice axe to the plastic binding piece.  One of them I pretty much stuck into touring mode and the other plastic bit was totally shattered.  I had to pry the stuck one off my boot and spent about 15 minutes after we were done skinning trying to fix the shattered one so it was skiiable.  Oops.  Fortunately from this point near the Vallot hut, the route is a boot pack anyhow.

We reached the Vallot hut and Kristy unroped, dropped her crampons and decided not to go to the summit.  So Tim and I ditched our skis here and short roped for the 600m ascent to the summit.  It was now 7:20 and we had about 2 hours to ascend the ridgeline to the summit.  The ridgeline is exceedingly aesthetic and drops off either mildly or steeply on either side as you crampon your way up and across to the summit.  About halfway there, we were passed by a soloist.  Kristy had decided to head to the summit and was soloing, but refused our offer to rope up with her at this point, and hauled ass past us to the summit a good 10 minutes before we arrived.  We tagged a lightly windy but brutally cold summit and huddled up.  I fueled up a bit with the last of my brownie, sandwich, and a slice of camembert (would the summit of mont blanc be complete without a piece of tasty brie?).  We hit the summit at pretty much 930am on the dot, right on time!  After a 15 minute break and some summit shots, we cruised our way back to the Vallot hut for the ski down.

Down: Monster Crevasses with a side of Seracs

After we skiied down hard snow & ice over the bergschrund things got nice & spicy as we skiied over small snowbridges spanning crevasses you could fit the space needle into.  One of the few times on this trip I was pretty glad that the route had been skiied quite a lot the past many days because navigating the correct snow bridges to get onto the petit plateau would have been extremely time consuming if not fucking frightening.  Kristy skiied far ahead while I was waiting for Tim to ski across the plateau before we navigated another series of crevasses before the massive serac debris field.  Since the two of us only had the one rope that Tim was carrying (Kristy was carrying my rescue rope) we waited for a british party to follow us with another rope so somebody could pluck Tim out should he take the plunge.
The seracs on the normal route are ENORMOUS and you have to walk/slip/curse your way through debris fields of enormous blocks of ice boulders to make your way past the seracs.  I had imagined you could ski quickly under the seracs to limit your time in the danger zone.  Really though, there is so much debris it€™s like somebody smashed an ice rink and lightly covered it in snow; not fast at all.  The ski out from that was fairly straightforward skiing on the side of the ridgeline overlooking the broken up bosson glacier.  There were some rather hairy sections of ice lightly covered in snow though which made for some sketchy slipping and side slipping to gain more skiiable ground.  Yeesh.

Tim and I arrived back to the Mullets hut to grab the rest of our gear to find Kristy had taken the headstart to heat up the leftover food and melt snow for a bunch more water for our ski out.  We did end up leaving rather late (2pm, much later than suggested) for a slushy & scary ski out the lower bosson glacier.  My tip for you on this ski out is to keep up your speed on the flats.  There are holes, but hopefully you remember them from the ski up, or like me, you just have enough speed to clear the smaller ones  ;).

All in all a great, big, grueling adventure in ski mountaineering.


Full trip report on my blog: http://www.bramski.org/skiing/mont-blanc-north-ridge-and-normal-route/
All my pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/bramski/MontBlancSkiNRidgeAndNormalRoute#