SX Magazine Dec 2002
OUT OF the corner of my eye I caught a puff of snow. Someone’s falling, I thought. I looked at the mountain across the valley and searched for the tumbling figure. He’s a gonna.
It was a beautiful, crisp, blue-sky September morning and people were dotted all over the mountain doing their own thing. The Aiguille du Midi cable car goes from the centre of Chamonix to 3700m on Mont Blanc, at 4870m the tallest mountain in the European Alps.
From the top cable car station you walk through a tunnel carved in the glacier to emerge at the top of a perilously steep snow arete, the Arete du Midi. On the left, it drops 2000m to Chamonix Valley, on the right it drops 200m into the wide Valle Blanche before rising again as it meets the hulk of the Mont Blanc massif.
In winter this is the gateway for thousands of adventurous skiers for whom the Valle Blanche is a highly prized 20km off-piste adventure, back to the valley below. In summer tourists watch agog as mountaineers wanting to bag the summit of Mont Blanc don crampons and march off down the arete. The mountaineers are joined by greyhound-like Alpinists, lean, keen and intent on climbing one of thousands of rock, ice or mixed routes in the massif.
Chamonix is the centre of the world when it comes to mountain sports. They invented Alpine climbing, Alpinism, here back in the 1700s. Before then the mountains were places of fear, not inspiration.
Mont Blanc was first climbed in 1786 by two Chamionards, 20 years after a reward was posted for the first ascent. Since then tourists, climbers, alpinists, hikers, mountain bikers, base jumpers, skiers and all the crazy people of the world have headed to Chamonix.
It’s a relatively small place, the main town has a couple of supermarkets, hundreds of holiday apartments, dozens of hotels, lots of mountain shops and many, many bars, all with al fresco tables perfectly positioned for mountain watching. Strung along the valley stretching up to the Col de Balme and into Switzerland are villages of ever decreasing size. The village of Le Tour at the top of the valley is just a hamlet.
But the point is not to be in town, it’s to be up high, in the mountains. And Chamonix Valley is blessed with dozens of cable cars that get you to glacier level in mere minutes. There is also a large network of Alpine huts, which allows you to travel light and stay overnight in comfort, the essence of Alpinism. Such easy access also means people are constantly getting into trouble, some years as many as a hundred people will die in the Alps from avalanches, falling, exposure or getting hit by rock fall.
Unlike the USA, with its mountain regulation and litigation, the French are very laissez-faire. If you want to ski off piste, climb solo without safety equipment, base jump off a cliff or roll down the hill in your pyjamas, you can, there are no limits. What there is is a fleet of red helicopters ready to pluck you from the mountain-side at the merest hint of trouble. They charge of course, but unlike other places, if you lack insurance they’ll still rescue you.
Back on the hill, the puff of snow was replaced by another puff, then another. This was no accident, this was a skier. He was skiing down what we were heading to climb, a 70 degree mountain face called Mont Blanc du Tacul, a minor summit of Mont Blanc.
He was alone; up at dawn he had first climbed the face, and was now skiing down it. Ahead of him was the bergschrund, where the glacier breaks away from mountain face, creating a giant crevasse. We waited for him to stop. No chance, he went straight over it, just like in those cliff-jumping snowboard movies. Pfft! He landed, light as a feather and skied off, onto easy ground.
It was classic Chamonix. Not only an extreme skier, but the best extreme skier. Later we found out it was a guy called Pierre Tardivel, Chamonix resident and first man to ski down Everest. “Mont Blanc”, he seemed to be saying, “It’s my playground”.
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