April 25-27, 2008, Mt Blanc

On April 25, 26 and 27, Corinne, Christian, two of his clients €“ James and Donald €“ and I climbed Mt Blanc. After the big snow falls in the previous days, it seemed like this was a good weather window before a new degradation was announced Sunday night.
Corinne and I left Zurich Friday morning at 10 after having literally organized babysitters last minute to enable us to go on this trip together. After having taken the 2 pm gondola up to the Plan de l€™aiguille, we were off on our skis towards the Grand Mulets hut.  In this warm afternoon we were carefully looking out for any wet slabs, but luckily a few clouds kept the temperatures a little cooler than initially forecasted. After 3 hours of skinning through beautiful landscapes, traversing slopes below the Aiguille du Midi, the Glacier Rond and crossing the glacier des Bossons, we reached the Grand Mulets hut where we met Christian and his clients. The hut was quite busy for what was the first really good looking week end of the season. After a great dinner, beuatful sunset and a great night of sleep we were off for day 2.


Day 1: Corinne skinning up towards the Grand Mulets on the Glacier des Bossons.


Day 1: sunset on the Aiguille du Midi, seen from the roof of the Grands Mulets hut. The couloir du Glacier Rond and couloir des Cosmiques can be seen here.


All groups were planning on climbing to the summit the next day through the most direct route in a long 1800 m climb. Because of the big exposure to ice falls on this route and the number of accidents that had occurred on that route, we had decided to take an alternate route and climb towards the Refuge du Gouter to join the classic route of the summer. We slept in until 7 am and by the time we got going all groups were coming back down and hadn€™t made the summit because of the strong winds at higher elevations. The 700 meter climb to the Gouter hut was beautiful, leading us over a large bench located over a huge icefall over the Glacier de Taconnaz, but was also very tiring as we had to break trail in a very deep and sometimes crusty snowpack. We reached the refuge dug outer and were the only group there €“ what a change from the typical summer day where this hut has over 100 people crammed in it. We had the unpleasant surprise to find about 1 foot of snow covering all the beds in the hut as someone had probably not shut the door carefully, so we made camp in the main dining area and installed our bed on the dining tables. We spent the rest of the afternoon soaking up the sun and enjoying the view sitting in front of the hut. Being all by ourselves up in that hut was wonderful.


Day 2: our group traversing towards the Gouter hut

After a fairly cold night, we were all happy to get up a little ahead of the planned time before 6 am and got going towards the Dome du Gouter. There was only very light wind and the climb was quite pleasant, though trailbreaking was again pretty rough at times. After a couple of hours we reached the dome du Gouter and after a short descent climbed towards the Vallot hut. We decided to leave our skis below Vallot as snow conditions didn€™t look great higher up on the mountain. The climb up the arête des Bossons was beautiful and by now we were mixed with a number of groups who had climbed up directly from the Grands Mulets. A little after 11 am we reached the summit €“ quite tired - enjoyed the great views in a wind protected spot and quickly were on the way back down. We skied down the direct route to the Grands Mulets, stopping only very little to minimize our time below the seracs. A short climb took us back towards the Aiguille du Plan where we were happy to enjoy a beer in the sun, before taking the gondola back down to Chamonix. A fantastic climb!!


Christian and his clients getting ready to climb the last part of the arete des Bosses towards the summit.