This is the third of four posts describing our trek around the Tour du Mont Blanc in September, a classic 170km circuit of Western Europe’s highest mountain. After starting out from Chamonix and walking the western section through France, we crossed Italy and arrived on the Swiss border at Grand Col Ferret. The story continues from there.
In 2003 I was a young slip of a lad who had recently quit his job in search of adventure. I took some time off to go exploring the mountainous regions of the world. In the first year, I went to Nepal, Morocco, Peru, Kenya and Tanzania. I started the year with a life-time altitude record of 1,085m on the summit of Snowdon (now known as Yr Wyddfa), the highest mountain in Wales. By the end of it, I had explored the Himalayas, High Atlas and Andes, and had an altitude record of 5,895m on the summit of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.
By the second year, I was starting to realise that if I wanted to go any higher than this, then I was going to need some technical climbing skills. I signed up for a guided ascent of Mont Blanc that included a few days at the beginning of the week buggering about on nearby glaciers, learning ice axe and crampon technique, and a few basic rope skills.
In the course of a 3-day foray onto the ice, I ascended the Glacier du Tour, a short hop from Chamonix, descended an ice wall into Switzerland and enjoyed several mild bollockings from my guides along the way. My transgressions included tripping over my crampons, falling into a crevasse, using profanities while ice climbing, and tobogganing down an ice slope before I had been taught how to arrest. My punishment came when one guide lowered me off a peak while my awkwardly positioned harness rested on my tenderest regions. Until then I had found alpine guides hot-tempered, but this one seemed indifferent to my pained falsetto.
I did eventually pick up the necessary skills, but it took a few expeditions; I documented this progression from hillwalker to mountain climber in my book Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest, which may provide a chortle or two.
I spent one day in Switzerland. Underneath the ice wall, two of my companions volunteered to jump into a crevasse so that our guides could demonstrate how to carry out a rescue (I’ve been taught crevasse rescue a few times since, and still the only bit I can remember is how to fall in one). We crossed an ice sheet, the Plateau du Trient, and spent an uncomfortable night in a hut, the Cabane du Trient. My ‘bed’ was a mattress on the floor, no wider than a torso. Every time any of us rolled over, we rolled 5 or 6 other people with us. We returned across the plateau the following morning as the sun was rising, then scrambled up a rock peak, the Aiguille du Tour (3,540m) before crossing back into France.
I had not returned to Switzerland since. That was until September, when our trek around the Tour du Mont Blanc (or TMB) took us up to the Grand Col Ferret on the southern side of the massif. This was the border between Italy and Switzerland. You can read about the French and Italian sections of our trek in my previous two posts. The journey continues here…
Day 6, part 2 – Grand Col Ferret to La Fouly
As we stood on the Grand Col Ferret, we were very close to the border of three countries. That point lay on the summit of Mont Dolent (3,820m), somewhere above us to the north. Mont Dolent was first climbed in 1864 by Edward Whymper and Michel Croz via the Petit Col Ferret from Rifugio Elena. We could see a high cirque with a glacier spilling from an ice sheet; but the summit remained firmly in cloud and I could only speculate about its appearance. Likewise, looking back into the Italian Val Ferret, the tangled mass of the Grandes Jorasses also lurked in cloud. To the south, the ridge we were standing on rose more modestly to a tiny rock peak about 200m away.
Our way lay east into Switzerland. The trail swung right and descended in an arc over gentle grassy slopes. It was easy going and we raced down to reach a bend in the valley where the Swiss Val Ferret took a sharp left and a side valley came in from the right. A refuge with a paved balcony just below our trail reminded me of a Himalayan teahouse perching high on a hillside.
Here the main trail dropped to the valley floor to join a road, but we took a variant route that stayed on the left side of the valley. I hoped it would be quieter, and it turned out to be a true delight. Before long we found ourselves on a high trail through forest, similar to those we trekked in Corsica last year.
We had glimpses down into the valley; its tarmacked road ran along the bottom like a ribbon. The road looked modern, but we saw no traffic. Up ahead the glaciated wall of Mont Dolent remained in cloud – it could be a friendly snow dome or a nasty sawtooth; I had no idea.
At noon we stopped on a grassy promontory to have lunch and soak up the scene. Below us, the first homes and chalets of La Fouly, today’s destination, nestled among pine forest in the valley floor. The variant trail eventually descended a side gully through forest to drop closer to the valley bottom. We passed a signpost pointing to ‘Ferret’, the name of a village presumably. Somebody had scribbled ‘Danish cwm :-)’ in black marker pen beneath, which puzzled me; I didn’t realise they had hills in Denmark. Had I been carrying a pen of my own, I might have been tempted to add ‘Yorkshire trouser companion’ to the graffiti.
We followed a farm track for a mile or so before descending to cross the river a few metres short of the village. La Fouly turned out to be a tidy tourist village of wooden chalets set among pine forest. We reached our hotel, the Auberge des Glaciers, at 1.20. It had a bar and a large rooftop patio. The place was surprisingly lively given its setting high in a remote valley.
We weren’t allowed to check into our room until two o’clock, so we had a beer on the terrace as we waited. My eyes were drawn to the Glacier de la Neuve on the mountain wall opposite, which showed clear evidence of rapid retreat. It sat atop the smoothest of rock faces which had been scoured clean by its withdrawal. This had obviously happened too recently for the ice to be replaced by vegetation. The forest line was sharply defined, but a few flecks of green speckled the slopes where trees are making tentative inroads up the newly polished slope.
When we were finally allowed into our room, we found it had a number of quirks. There was an uncovered shower cubicle in the middle of the wall at the foot of the bed. It was the only room we stayed in with a shared bathroom down the hallway. Most alarmingly, there were two very low roof beams right by the bed, which I felt certain I would smack my head on if I got up during the night.
In the restaurant that evening, we shared a backroom with a huge commercial group who were using the downstairs dormitory. Just before the main course, their leader stood up to make a speech about the following day’s itinerary, which silenced everyone else in the room. It felt a bit like being on a school trip.
We were on half-board again, which meant we had no choice over the menu, but we were amazed to be served four courses. After a thick pumpkin soup, Edita was delighted to be served a second-course salad. Half of our dinners until then had been pizza, and she was feeling deprived of lettuce and tomato.
Day 7 – La Fouly to Champex
I managed to survive the night without headbutting a beam while going to relieve myself, and slept pretty well. At breakfast, the big group caused a commotion once again. The table next to ours had been set aside for their lunches, and they arrived in twos and threes to assemble the ingredients and pass on the instructions to the next person. The rest of us sat quietly and watched. Strangely (but thankfully), instead of hitting the trail they boarded a bus to Champex and we didn’t see them again.
There was a supermarket conveniently located below the patio of our hotel. We bought supplies for the day then made up sandwiches in our room. All was quiet when we left the hotel at 8.30, apart from a handful of people waiting at a bus stop. In fact, it was so quiet as we walked through the village and turned down to the river, that I started to suspect that the trail was closed and we were the only people who didn’t know about it. On every other day we’d encountered hordes of people shortly after starting out.
It was bliss having the trail to ourselves for the first half hour, but I was happy to overtake our first guided group. The guide would surely know if the trail was closed. I breathed a sigh of relief.
It was an easy walk down the valley for the first part of the day, as the path weaved through forest above the left bank of the river and the sun remained in shade behind mountains. There were some dramatic sections when the crashing river disappeared far beneath us and the narrow trail rose above cliffs. One section was so exposed that it was protected by chains, although we didn’t have to use them.
The valley widened and the trail suddenly turned at right angles to take us into the middle of it. There was an unusual section along the crest of a forested ridge that was as straight as a Roman road. It was know as the Crête de Saleina and was actually a crest of moraine that was left behind by a glacier which has long since retreated and been replaced with forest.
At about 10am the trail broke out into an open meadow surrounded by immaculate wooden chalets. The hillsides all around were carpeted in pines and larches. We joined a quiet estate road that took us down to the main road at the village of Praz de Fort. We were back in civilisation now, but although there was a cluster of stone buildings by the road at the point where we crossed the river, the setting was decidedly sylvan. Widely dispersed houses in the style of log cabins sprawled up the valley sides.
We descended a broad, open area to Les Arlaches, a quaint village of wooden barns with hanging baskets squeezed together along a narrow street. A short distance down the valley a tapered peak rose like a raven’s beak above the left-hand side of the valley, its serrated summit only just showing its teeth above forested slopes. This was Le Catogne (2,598m), marked on my map as an island surrounded by greenery on the extreme north-east corner of the Mont Blanc massif. There was a gap in the hillside on its facing slopes and I could see smart hotels looking down at us from its edge. I realised that Champex, our lakeside destination, must lie within this gap, and the hotels were its outskirts. It didn’t look so far away, but there was a big climb up through forest to get there.
We passed through Les Arlaches and returned to the main road at Issert, a village of more modern buildings along a straight section of road. We crossed again, back to the left side of the valley, to reach the foot of the climb. The 400m ascent to Champex took just over an hour. It was the most GR20-like section of the trail, made more so by blistering sunshine piercing the trees. The ascent was steep, but the trail was pleasantly shaded as we passed through dense forest. Every so often there was a tempting clearing with a picnic table overlooking the Val Ferret. It was much too early to stop for lunch though, and we pushed on.
We were now on a tourist trail known as the Sentier de Champignons (‘Mushroom Trail’) which provided a quirky feature. No, not hallucinogenic fungi. Every few hundred metres we passed a wooden sculpture hewn from an old tree stump. The sculptures depicted nature that you might expect to find in a forest such as, well, mushrooms of course, but also squirrels, hares, owls, and even a wild boar. Still no ferrets though. More exciting than this were the real live black squirrels that we caught glimpses of throughout the day. We saw many leaping from branch to branch beside the trail. But they were annoyingly camera shy and wouldn’t keep still. No sooner did I have one in focus than it would already be in the next tree.
Towards the top of the trail we climbed above the bottom end of the Val Ferret and could see the town of Orsières down below, stretching across an open area at the confluence of two valleys. Up the side valley rose the giant snow-capped massif of the Grand Combin, known to Brits as the Grand Combine Harvester.
We reached Champex soon after midday. It had been a short and easy day but extremely pleasant; a nice contrast to the rest of the Tour. The trail had been quiet, without the usual hordes of hikers. I never did find out why.
Champex was a charming little tourist resort perched high in a natural cirque. It consisted of chalets clustered around a lake and was surrounded on three sides by forested hills. On the fourth side we could look across the Val Ferret to the Grand Combin. We walked to our hotel, the Hotel du Glacier at the far end of the village, where the road started to rise beyond. It was still early, but the staff allowed us to check into the room. It was a glorious day, so we left our bags and wandered back to a bench on the lake shore to eat our sandwiches. We were mobbed by ducks and coots hoping for crumbs. My baguette was huge (as the bishop said) and I caused an anatine commotion at the end of the meal by throwing a few chunks across the water.
The forecast for the following day was perfect, so we set our sights on the high route across the Col de Fenêtre d’Arpette, at 2,665m the joint highest point on the Tour du Mont Blanc, a distinction it shared with the Col du Fours, which we crossed on our third day out of Chamonix. At the end of the day we were supposed to catch a bus down to our hotel in the town of Martigny. But there was only one bus all day, at 5pm. Remembering the crowd of people waiting by the roadside at Arnouva two days earlier, we expected we may have to fight to get on it. Then I remembered Luca, our cheerful taxi driver who arrived within minutes and whisked us away, anthemic Italian rock music blasting on his stereo. Waiting a couple of hours only to be left by the roadside seemed silly when we could have the Swiss version of Luca. To give us a bit more flexibility, Edita rang to book a taxi, time to be confirmed.
Later that evening, we were served one of the nicest meals of the trip in the hotel restaurant: a posh chicken and potato dish for me and trout for Edita. The restaurant was tastefully furnished with ceiling-high tree trunks and tables spaced widely apart. There were no pichets of house wine, though, which meant I had to splash out 42 Swiss francs (more than 42 euros) on a bottle of pinot noir.
I’m conscious that some of the more intrepid among you will be thinking: hotel rooms, taxis, fancy wine – what is this? Are you on a trek or a pampered cruise? But I’ve always been a believer in the middle way. Hiking is fun, but there’s no need to hike in your underpants when you can wear a good pair of sturdy trousers.
Day 8 – Champex to Trient
We left Champex at 8.15. The village had been quiet since we arrived, but just as we stepped out of the hotel, a dozen more TMB trekkers appeared from somewhere, crevices in the road perhaps, and swept past the main entrance. We stopped at the bakery at the top of the hill to buy sandwiches, then continued on our way
We wondered if anyone else would be doing the high trail up to Fenêtre d’Arpette or whether the main body would do the lower ‘cow’ route through Alp Bovine. To begin with, it seemed to be the latter. The terrain started in a gentle way by following an excellent gravel track beside a bisse (or irrigation channel) deep in forest. The gradient seemed virtually non-existent, but we were climbing imperceptibly into the Val d’Arpette; by the time the path ascended some wooden steps to join a road, we were quite a long way above Champex.
We followed the road past some chalets then left the forest to cross a wide plain on a gradual incline. A jagged line of rock peaks laced with snow gullies rose ahead of us. There was a clear gap in the ridge above an enormous scree slope. This turned out to be the Col des Ecandies (2,796m). It led directly onto the Glacier du Trient, close to where I had served my alpine apprenticeship 21 years earlier. It would be nostalgic to return, but it wasn’t where we wanted to go. We would soon discover that our pass lay further to the right and out of sight.
The road – now a dirt track – re-entered the forest at the other side of the plain. A short distance above this, a narrow trail diverged towards the right of the valley. As we started up this route, two hunters armed with rifles emerged from the trees. One was carrying a deer carcass on his back. I was startled, and threw my hands up in mock surrender. Luckily they appeared to have a sense of humour, and smiled rather than shooting me.
We soon emerged above the treeline; the trail climbed more steeply past thickets of juniper. We started to overtake pockets of people who had made earlier starts. The trail was rough and boulder strewn. There were many sections like this on the GR20 last year, but it was only now, the first time that we’d encountered such terrain on the TMB, that I realised how good the trails had been, smooth underfoot and easygoing.
We crested a rise and the trail skirted to the right of a moraine bank. Just above this, it climbed more steeply above the right side of the valley. I realised that we were being funnelled into an adjoining valley. The gap at the top of this one was much narrower, a sharpened ‘V’ in the jagged ridgeline. This made sense: as many of you will know, fenêtre means window, which suggests a narrow opening.
There was a long section of scrambling across giant boulders before the trail steepened to complete one final series of zigzags up to the pass. We reached the 2,665m top at 11.15. It was indeed a very narrow window between two rocky pinnacles. One needle above the summit signpost might have been tempting to more foolhardy scramblers than I. We had to queue for photos and spent just five minutes up there before crossing to the other side.
We descended west into the Vallée du Trient. There was a short boulder field immediately below the Fenêtre. We had only descended a few metres when I noticed a splash of white up to our left; I found myself looking up at the Plateau du Trient, the giant ice sheet that I had crossed all those years ago. A double pyramid of rock at the top of the ice was clearly the Aiguille du Tour. Suddenly, those 21 years came hurtling back to me. I could hear the ear-bashing as I tabogganed down the slope, and felt those squashed testicles sandpapering my harness like it was only yesterday. Although I became very comfortable on steep snow and ice, I never did consider myself a climber. What useful knots I learned would disappear from memory as soon as I returned from a trip. But that icefield up to my left was where my mountaineering started; I felt myself looking back across the years through this window into my past.
The boulder field continued for about 100m of descent. We raced down it. The route soon became a fine, airy path high above the right side of the Vallée du Trient. The descent was relentlessly steep, but the view was magnificent: limestone peaks aproned in forest stretching to the far horizon. Over our left shoulders, the shrinking tongue of the Glacier du Trient lay across bare rock slopes. Above it, the smooth surface of the Plateau du Trient shone like starlight.
We continued without stopping. I expected the gradient to slacken when we reached the treeline, but it continued unabated. I was running out of energy and needed food. At 12.15 we eyed some sloping slabs to the left of the path and stopped for lunch. We sat in hot sun and ate our sandwiches. Edita lost a pair of earplugs that fell out of her pack and rolled down the slab into impenetrable undergrowth. I tried hacking at the vegetation with my trekking pole, but the plugs were nowhere to be seen.
We continued refreshed after a 45-minute break and descended through forest to reach the river. The setting felt remote, but I was astonished to break out of the trees and stumble across a café in a clearing. Children played by the waterside and dozens of tourists sat on a wooden terrace sipping coffee.
‘I guess there must be a car park nearby,’ I said.
Edita remained silent, but she was probably thinking ‘no shit, Sherlock’.
In fact, the car park turned out to be an hour’s walk away at Col de la Forclaz, a truck stop on the main road between France and Switzerland. A signpost just the other side of the café said one hour to Trient. Edita phoned up the taxi company to rearrange our cab for 3pm.
Most of the hour was spent on a dead-flat bisse path that contoured 100m above a broad pastoral valley. The trail was easy and swarming with day hikers. We continued along it for half an hour until a long, slanting path descended into Trient.
We reached the village at 2.30; I expected a bustling tourist centre, but Trient – after which a valley, a glacier and a giant snow plateau are named – turned out to be a sleepy little village at a narrow bend in the valley. It was hemmed in on two sides by wooded hills, but a long avenue to the south provided a grand vista of the Plateau du Trient. Neat box houses clustered around a striking pink church with a spire. The main road up to Col de la Forclaz bypassed the village. We crossed over, descended a quiet residential street, and after 50m found we had crossed the village in its entirety. There were two hotels at the bottom; one was closed, but the bar was open at the second and we were able to enjoy a beer in the garden while we waited for our taxi.
There was no sign of a bus stop and we would probably have missed the bus had we waited for it. We wandered up and down a metalled lane until our taxi driver phoned Edita and came to find us. He drove us up through forest to pass a large tourist refuge on top of the Col de la Forclaz. On the other side of the col we could see the town of Martigny on a large plain far beneath us. The road took four giant switchbacks to get down to it.
Martigny was a strange sort of place. The setting was stunning, surrounded by high forested peaks. But the town itself was so modern and industrial that it made Milton Keynes seem quaint. Our hotel, the ironically named Martigny Boutique Hotel, was on the far end of town. We passed through characterless industrial estates separated by roundabouts. We were dropped at a green concrete building in a field beside a flyover. It was a modern Premier Inn-type hotel, about as boutique as a McDonald’s restaurant. It was the only place we had stayed all trip that couldn’t be described as ‘boutique’, yet that was what it chose to call itself.
It was 3.30 and our baggage transfer had not yet arrived. There was a shopping park with a supermarket beneath an underpass just five minutes from the hotel. We went to get lunch for the following day while we waited for our bags. The place was depressing. Were these open spaces and roundabouts all there was to life in this naturally picturesque setting?
In the evening we decided to explore. We walked around the back of a huge railway terminus that dominated the town, through a car park and into the main centre. The streets were built on a grid pattern, with wide avenues and modern four-storey buildings. Edita had chosen a restaurant on Google Maps, but she wasn’t letting on where it was. She led us all the way through the town centre and out the other side. We crossed a river and the plateau walls loomed ahead of us.
‘Where on earth are you taking us?’ I said.
We were approaching a petrol station on the edge of town when she diverted into an older area of ramshackle houses. We turned down a narrow street and arrived at a tiny family-run Italian restaurant nestling beneath a cliff face. It was still early evening and the family were sitting at the front, chatting. They jumped up to serve us as soon as we approached. The interior was bedecked in Maradona memorabilia; I guessed the owner was a Napoli fan. We enjoyed a nice dinner of pasta and red wine, and I decided Martigny wasn’t so bad after all.
Day 9, part 1 – Trient to Col de Balme
Our modern hotel on the edge of an industrial estate had, however, been a jolt to the system after days of high passes and forest trails. A short taxi ride perhaps, but it was a world away from the TMB. Fortunately, there was a cure. Our taxi driver returned at 8.30, drove us back through the town – where we discovered that Martigny did in fact have an older part on the opposite side from our industrial estate. We wound up the hairpins and across the Col de la Forclaz. He deposited us back in Trient at 9am.
Thus began one of the best, perhaps THE best day of the TMB. It started with a long, straight walk up a quiet back road along the bottom of the valley that we skirted high on the bisse path the previous afternoon. Towards the top end of this road we found ourselves looking straight up the Vallée du Trient to our left. The Glacier du Trient spilled down from the Plateau du Trient on the right, but bare rock slopes to the left had been scoured clean. The centre of the skyline was dominated by the jagged rock pyramid of Pointe des Ecandies (2,873m). Col des Ecandies, which we had seen from the other side, was immediately to its left. We could now see that this would not have been a good place to emerge into the Vallée du Trient, for a line of rock stalagmites barred the exit. As we rose higher, we could see more of the view to the left and the more inviting Fenêtre d’Arpette eventually appeared, the left-most of three notches on the skyline.
Our trail crossed a river then turned into a narrow trail that climbed in zigzags through forest. We rose high above a side valley to the right. By walking slowly, the ascent was easy for us, shaded from the sun by the trees, and we gobbled up the height without really exerting. After an hour of climbing we broke out of the forest and could see the Col de Balme ahead of us, the border between Switzerland and France. There was a stone refuge on top, right on the skyline. The remainder of the ascent was on a much gentler gradient; along a stony track with the col always in view.
We reached the top at 11.15 and had our best view of the whole trip. We also faced a dilemma. But in cliffhanger tradition, I will leave it to my fourth and final post…
To be continued…
To view all photos from our trek, see my Tour du Mont Blanc Flickr album.
