This is the last 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 Switzerland, and arrived back on the French border at Col de Balme. The story continues from there.
My first night out in Chamonix for 19 years had been a shock. It was mid-September and I expected the mountaineering capital of Western Europe to be warm, as indeed it had been at our home in the Cotswolds the week before.
But Chamonix is almost 1,000m higher than the Cotswolds, and hemmed in by mountains on two sides. There was snow on those mountaintops when we approached from Geneva. A cold wind was blowing as we walked across Place Balmat to the restaurant that evening, and people were wearing duvet jackets. I wore extra layers as we wandered the town the following day. Mont Blanc was hidden behind cloud, as was the much lower peak of Le Brévent on the other side of the valley – a peak that we were due to climb on the first day of the Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB).
Luckily for us, however, it was the last day of wintry weather. It was going to take us 10 days to trek the TMB, and according to the weather forecast, the next six looked pretty good. In fact, the next nine were splendid. Several inches of snow lay on the ground as we walked up to Le Brévent, but then the sunny weather returned, the snow melted and we had a marvellous trek.
For nine days the weather was as good as we could have hoped for, but not for ten; and ten days were what we needed to complete the trek.
As we walked up to Col de Balme on the ninth day of our trek to cross the border from Switzerland to France, I experienced a familiar feeling of déjà vu. Last year on Corsica’s GR20, Edita and I experienced 12 days of blistering sunshine. Then, on the 13th and final day, the great window in the sky slid open and the weather gods emptied their pots. It happened to be the most treacherous day of the trek, with hundreds of metres of metal chains lining the trail to stop you sliding into a chasm. I needed them, and I nearly died descending the Spasimata Slabs.
Fast forward one year. Once again, we had enjoyed beautiful weather every day. Once again the most fearsome section was reserved for the final day: the fabled Grand Balcon Sud which traversed the sides of the craggy Aiguilles Rouges on the northern side of the Chamonix Valley.
Here’s what the Cicerone guidebook has to say about this section:
To reach it [the high point] by the main route entails climbing a series of metal ladders, rungs, platforms and timber steps – the celebrated passage délicat – that some walkers may find troublesome, especially those with a tendency towards vertigo. From these artificial aids, which have been provided to overcome steep rock slabs, you gain a sensational bird’s-eye view onto the rooftops of Argentière, 800m below.
Indeed. And if the Spasimata Slabs were anything to go by then in addition to the steep rock slabs, the other passage délicat was likely be my back one. Clearly we needed good weather to avoid another wet slab situation. We just needed one more good day. But would the weather gods grant it?
Will Gregg Wallace get another TV show? Of course not.
For days, the weather forecast had been predicting low clouds and heavy rain for the final day of our trek, the day we were due to stride across the Grand Balcon Sud and have those magnificent views across the valley to the Mont Blanc massif and that sensational bird’s-eye view onto the rooftops of Argentière. Weather forecasts can change, and when I looked again that morning at our hotel in Martigny, it had indeed changed: it was even worse.
We did have a contingency, though. We had a rest day scheduled in Chamonix at the end of the trek before we were due back in Geneva to catch our flight. Argentière, our journey’s end for day 9 is only a 15-minute drive from Chamonix. We could jump in a taxi and make day 10 our rest day before getting a taxi back to resume our trek on day 11.
In the meantime, I couldn’t complain about the weather as we approached Col de Balme on a gently sloping path enlivened by red-leaved blueberry enveloping the hillsides in heather-like carpets. On the horizon ahead of us was the Refuge du Col de Balme, a rectangular stone building that straddled the border between Switzerland and France.
The journey continues as we return through France to Chamonix…
Day 9, part 2 – Col de Balme to Argentière
We reached the 2,191m top of Col de Balme at 11.15 and had our best view of the whole trip. We were staring down into the Chamonix Valley with the buildings of Chamonix and Argentière far below.
The giant snowcaps of Aiguille Verte (4,122m) and Mont Blanc (4,808m) screamed for attention on the skyline ahead of us. The former was broad and menacing; it rose above a series of intervening ridges in a mass of angry cliffs and snow gullies. Mont Blanc looks friendlier from the Chamonix side – and it is. Its rolling curves of snow make it a reasonable ambition for people without a lot of mountaineering experience. It rose directly ahead of us down the valley, with the buildings of Chamonix glittering at its feet. Astride its left shoulder, however, were a series of black spikes, the Chamonix aiguilles, that attract more serious climbers. Immediately to the left and beneath Aiguille Verte, I was able to identify the top of the ski lift from Le Tour and the trail I must have taken to Albert Premier Refuge on the edge of Glacier du Tour 21 years earlier.
The right side of the valley was no less picturesque. We could see a curving path on a grassy hillside leading down to another col. Beyond this was a crinkled peak crowned on its left by a fluted cliff. These were the Col des Posettes and Aiguillette des Posettes that we would need to cross to get down to Argentière. Beyond them rose the two great rocky fortresses of the Aiguilles Rouges, not snow-capped like their big brothers across the valley, but rugged and dramatic nonetheless.
We could clearly see the trail of the Grand Balcon Sud snaking halfway up their flanks. Above this line were substantial slabs that I suspected must be the location of the ‘troublesome’ ladders. It looked an amazing trail, a balcony high in the sky. But I shuddered at the horrendous weather forecast. It was going to be a balcony in the clouds, slippery like a bar of soap. Our plan B was to do it the day after if the weather improved, but as we surveyed the landscape, Edita hit upon a plan C.
‘Why don’t we do it this afternoon?’
I looked at the slopes beneath the Grand Balcon Sud. It was too far to reach Chamonix in a single day, but if there was an exit from the end of the hard section down to our hotel in Argentière then Edita’s plan C could be a goer. It didn’t look promising. Immediately above Argentière were slopes of pine forest, but between the trees and the trail were sheer cliffs.
‘I will have to check my app when we get closer, and see if there’s a trail back down to the valley,’ I replied.
The Col de Balme was busy with tourists. We left to follow the curving path that swept to the right across yellow slopes with an eagle-eye view of the Chamonix Valley and Mont Blanc massif. On the Italian and Swiss sections of the Tour, our view of the massif had often been confined within the walls of deep valleys. When we did rise up to cross passes, clouds obscured the mountaintops. But now we were traversing a ridge across the valley from the massif; it was like taking a step back for a better view.
It took only about 20 minutes to descend to the Col des Posettes; we arrived at 11.45. There followed a memorable path along the crest of a ridge up to the Aiguillette des Posettes, over all manner of jagged boulders and flanked by red-leaved blueberries. Every few metres, it seemed that we had a better view of the peaks across the valley and I couldn’t keep my camera in its bag. As we trekked south, the icy plateau of the Glacier du Tour and serrated dragonback of the Aiguille du Chardonnet (3,824m) emerged to the left of Aiguille Verte, and the double mitre of Les Drus (3,754m) peeped up to its right.
We reached the 2,201m summit of Aiguillette des Posettes at 12.30. It wasn’t much of a summit – more of a high point on the ridge. The way ahead went straight down the hillside to another col at the outpost of Tre-le-Champ, where the road crossed our ridge on its way from Chamonix to Trient in Switzerland. Across the col we could see a distinctive zigzag path leading up the other side to the twin towers of the Aiguilles Rouges. In fact this wasn’t the Grand Balcon Sud, but a parallel path that bypassed the ladder section by taking a higher route. It looked a severe undertaking for the afternoon if we were then to drop all the way over those cliffs and through forest to Argentière.
We descended a short way down the ridge then stopped for a long lunch looking across to Aiguille Verte and the curious twin discs of Les Drus. The Aiguillette des Posettes seemed to be a popular day hike; there were many people coming up from Tre-le-Champ. As we wolfed down our sandwiches, I took my phone out of airplane mode and tried to find a trail down to Argentière on my app. I could see that there was no direct trail down from Tête aux Vents (2,133m), the summit at the top of the Grand Balcon Sud’s ladders. To get down to Argentière we would need to go some way beyond, almost halfway to Chamonix, before doubling back on another winding trail. I estimated that it would take another 4 or 5 hours. Neither of us felt like doing this after lunch.
We raced down through forest to the road at Tre-le-Champ. At one point the trail switched back towards Le Tour, the village at the top end of the Chamonix Valley that once upon a time had a glacier reaching down towards it. But now the Glacier du Tour perched on a plateau high above. Between it and the village were hundreds of metres of bare rock. The forest was tentatively creeping up it, as if to conceal a crime, but the evidence was too plain to hide. I’ve seen such confirmation of retreating glaciers in so many places, most memorably in Colombia and on Kilimanjaro, but this was perhaps the clearest example I have ever seen.
We reached the road at 1.30. The trail from Tre-le-Champ was steep but enjoyable, taking shortcuts through forest to avoid the hairpins of the road from Argentière. We took the back road into Argentière on a dirt track past fields and chalets with wide gardens. The main part of the village lay on a hill along the main road. We reached it under sunny skies at 2.30 and checked into our room at the Hôtel Le Dahu. It was already raining when I emerged a couple of hours later to take a wander up and down the main street. Roadworks and traffic lights added to the shock of returning to civilisation after a day in the mountains. We were now back in the sprawl of the Chamonix Valley, at the northern end of a more or less continuous line of towns and villages between here and Les Houches, 16km away the other side of Chamonix.
We weren’t ready to give up on our trek yet, though. Over dinner we hatched a plan for the following day: to walk to Chamonix in the pissing rain along the Petit Balcon Sud, a lower trail that runs through forest parallel to the more epic Grand Balcon Sud. But the higher trail had cast a spell on us as we looked down from the Col de Balme, and we were keen to return and complete it the day after if weather permitted.
Day 10 – Argentière to Chamonix via the Petit Balcon Sud
There was a strangely hushed feel this morning, as though the TMB had been abandoned by everyone but ourselves. It appeared that we were the only trekkers using this hotel. We saw no one at all at breakfast. There was no one at reception either. We dropped our room key in a pot on the front desk and left for Chamonix.
The heavy rain that was forecast had not materialised; there was only a light drizzle. But the mist on the hills had descended almost to the village and it was probably a different story up above. With better weather forecast for tomorrow, we had no regrets about taking the Petit Balcon Sud to Chamonix.
It took us only three hours, but it was an enjoyable forest trail with ups and downs that kept 50 to 100m above the valley floor. Up in the forest we didn’t really notice the proximity to civilisation and the sprawl of towns and villages down below, apart from one short section when the trail dropped to a riverside and we could see houses on the other side. Twice we passed underneath a cable car down into the valley, both of them were closed for the season. The second was the one we took up to Planpraz when we started the TMB nine days earlier. We paused briefly to look down across the town, now bathing in mist. I was glad that we’d completed the circle today, even if it was on a lower path.
We left the Petit Balcon Sud and descended a zigzag path to join a metalled road above the cable car station in the higher reaches of Chamonix. We arrived in Place Balmat at 11.15 and had a coffee under the canopy of one of the pavement cafés. After seeing us arrive in waterproofs and carrying backpacks, a British lady sitting at another table congratulated us on completing the trail, but it didn’t feel like completion yet.
The heavy rain that was forecast arrived later in the afternoon. By then I was indulging in an unusual shopping spree. Knowing that our luggage might not arrive until 4pm, we left our bags at the Hotel Vallée Blanche, went for lunch, then toured Chamonix’s profusion of outdoor gear shops to kit ourselves out with clean clothes to change into.
Long-distance hiking can do strange things to people. A common one for me is to have Bohemian Rhapsody going around in my head for several days. In Nepal I often turn vegetarian for the duration of a trek; at the other end of the scale, I once returned from a two-month camping trip in Pakistan with a craving for pork that couldn’t be satisfied for a week. The TMB seemed to have a strange effect on both of us on the retail front. I hate shopping. Nevertheless, I had a whale of a time wandering the rainy streets of Chamonix. I bought myself new trousers, merino base layers, fresh socks and even a pair of luxurious merino undercrackers. Edita, on the other hand, loves shopping in outdoor shops. Rarely can she walk in one without emerging with something, yet this day of all days, when our luggage was at an unknown location between here and Argentière, she shopped for sweet Fanny Adams and came away with precisely nothing. In all the years trekking around outdoor gear shops with her, it was the first time I could ever recall this happening.
Luckily when we got back to the hotel, our bags had arrived, so the last laugh was on her.
Day 11 – Tre-le-Champ to Chamonix via the Grand Balcon Sud
It was dull and grey when we woke up the following morning; the sky was menacing, with dark clouds hanging over the mountains, almost down to the rooftops of the town. The weather forecast had worsened since yesterday; it was going to be another marvellous day for ducks.
At breakfast my mood was gloomy with a nagging sense of foreboding. I remembered what happened to me last year when the rains came on the last day of our trek along the GR20. I saw myself dangling by my right hand on a chain, a chasm below me and my ribs throbbing like a battered cod. I was keen to avoid that happening again.
After breakfast I re-read the guidebook, and even plotted an alternative version of the Grand Balcon Sud on my OS app that avoided the ladders. The main thing that prevented me from abandoning our plan B was the thought of another rainy day in Chamonix. The outdoor shops only had a limited supply of clothing and I really didn’t need another pair of smalls.
We might as well don our waterproofs and do a walk; the only question was, which walk?
At 8am we left the Hotel Vallée Blanche and carried our luggage up to our next hotel, the Alpine Eclectic. We put our bags into storage so that we could walk straight back there later in the afternoon. I ordered an Uber from outside the hotel. A car arrived within five minutes, and it took less than 20 minutes to drive through the sprawl of villages in the Chamonix Valley, through Argentière and up to the pass at Tre-le-Champ, from where the final leg of the TMB departs. The fare was just €40, less than half the prices charged by the ‘official’ taxi companies that were recommended by our trekking agency.
By the time we were dropped off, my mood had brightened. Although it was misty, there was no rain, and the ground looked relatively dry underfoot. In any case, we were dropped by the start of the main route, rather than the bypass trail that avoided the ladders. To chicken out would have involved a diversion. I had no hesitation in starting up the main trail.
‘This is the route with the ladders. Are you OK with that?’ I said.
But of course, Edita was never going to bottle it.
We left at 8.40 and climbed slowly through the forest on a good path. At first the trail was quiet; we saw no one until we emerged from the forest line. Here we overtook three people just before a giant cliff face emerged from the mist to our right. The cliff was a signal that the ladders were coming soon. We passed between the cliff and a 20m rock needle known as Aiguillette d’Argentière, a popular rock climbing objective, but of no interest to anyone it seemed that day. It reminded me of the Inaccessible Pinnacle on Skye, a shark’s fin of rock on a steep slope, resulting in a long edge on the downhill side and a shorter section on the uphill face. It even had a little finger of rock poking up at the very top, threatening to snap off if someone too heavy used it as a belay anchor (on Skye this rock is known as the ‘Bolster Stone’ and has been the subject of April Fool pranks). Sadly, I’ve been told that the Aiguillette is much harder to climb than the In Pinn, so I can’t claim to have bagged it already.
We arrived beneath the ladders just behind a trio of German hikers, who appeared to be a mother, father and adult daughter. This might have been annoying, even a little disconcerting had we found ourselves having to wait for them while we perched on precarious ledges. But they were quick; only on the longer ladders did we need to wait for them, and frequently they pulled ahead.
Much to my relief, the ladders turned out to be absolutely fine, very safe, usually quite short and with sizeable ledges in between. Most had handrails. I counted nine full ladders and a couple of half ladders in the main sequence. Above this sequence were some wooden ‘steps’ consisting of railway sleepers attached to sloping slabs. We completed this section in about ten minutes of climbing, but it wasn’t the full package. After a short traverse on a clifftop path, we reached a deep crack between slabs. The longest ladder of all, about 10m high, took us up and over the upper slab and a couple of smaller ladders spanned the crack. Some more railway sleepers took us up another slab, but we were up and over them a few minutes after 10am. Ten minutes later we were standing beside the cairn at Tête aux Vents (2,133m). It was something of an anticlimax, but in a good way. The fearsome ladders had turned out to be a breeze.
But our struggles weren’t over.
Tête aux Vents wasn’t a summit at all, just the top of the steep section. We could clearly see higher terrain stretching to our right, and had it not been misty we would probably have been able to deduce there was a whole mountain above us. The main route of the Grand Balcon Sud, and the route described in the Cicerone guidebook, now traversed straight ahead on a contour towards the cable car station at La Flégère. But the area to the right of this was a maze of criss-crossing pathways stretching up the mountainside. I was following the route on the app that had been provided by our agency, and it was only when we passed a signpost to La Flégère pointing back the way we’d come that I realised we had taken one of these alternative paths.
We had a short discussion. The trail we were on looked good, so rather than retrace our steps back down the hillside, we continued onwards. Before long our trail started rising over broken ground and it started snowing. We stopped to put on windproof coats.
Up, up, up went the trail, past some lakes and past more diverging trails. On another day I could see that it would have been a picturesque trail, but not today. In the creeping mist there was no way of knowing which trail was the right one and the only way to navigate was to keep my phone in my hand with the app pointing the way ahead.
Our trail started rising more steeply. We climbed two more ladders over rocks and another set of railway sleepers nailed to a sloping slab. The mist cleared and we spied a refuge high on a hill above us. I resigned myself to a long trudge uphill, 99.9% certain that our trail would lead inexorably up to that hut. I cursed my stupidity that had led us on this unnecessary diversion.
I estimated that we climbed an extra 300m in total. The hut stood by a lake shore marked on the map as Lac Blanc. It must have been named on a day when snow lay thickly on the ground. It wasn’t so today. The lake was black and the sand on its shore a silver-grey, as were the rocky slopes on its far side. Snow fell in soft flakes, but not enough to settle on the ground. We could see more mountainside towering over the lake, including a tongue of ice emerging from the cloud. The setting for this refuge would be an amazing location on another day, but I felt like we had added an hour or more to what was already going to be a long day.
After a few gulps of water, we followed a rocky path back down the hill. Again, there was a maze of diverging paths and I had to keep my phone in hand to navigate. We re-entered the mist, which shielded the terrain below us, though not enough to hide a bouquetin (or alpine ibex) grazing on a bank as we wandered past. We rejoined the main Grand Balcon Sud after crossing a long section of boardwalk and a bridge across a tiny lake. Soon after we crossed the tell-tale desecrated landscape of a ski resort outside of the winter season. A large expanse of hillside had been cleared of vegetation and reduced to gravel.
We ascended a stony track to arrive at the three-storey palace at La Flégère, with its slanting roof and wall of windows, a combination of cable car station, refuge and restaurant. It was closed for the season, but a hive of activity as builders carried out their work. We were locked out and forced to huddle under an eave with three other hikers as we ate our lunch. We could see dozens of workers eating their own packed lunches inside the restaurant; outside a helicopter hovered overhead as it dropped off bags of rocks for path repair.
We were cold and damp, but I was glad to stop for a rest and regain some energy. It was 12.15 and we had been walking non-stop for more than three hours. I glanced at the guidebook and was surprised to discover that we’d matched the time Cicerone had estimated in spite of our long diversion.
After a 30-minute rest we girded our loins for the very last section of the TMB. The trail from La Flégère to Planpraz started promisingly, contouring around a hillside with the Chamonix Valley far below. We could now see the valley floor, but the mountains above remained shrouded in cloud.
There was a pretty section through forest and we could see tantalising glimpses of the cable car station at Planpraz up ahead of us. It didn’t seem far away, but the distance was deceptive; we passed headland after headland and it disappeared from view.
The sun came out briefly as the trail dropped down to cross an area of grassy heathland, tricking us into stopping to take off our waterproofs. When the buildings of Planpraz re-emerged, they were high above us across a wooded combe. The trail took a long, rising circuit around its rim. As we started around it, the wind whipped up and the rain came, lightly at first but building in intensity. By the time I had stopped to put back on all the waterproofs that I’d taken off ten minutes earlier, it was lashing down in icy rods, and Edita was 100m ahead of me, having gamely continued into the wind.
Thankfully the rain was short-lived and had ceased when we finally arrived at Planpraz (2,000m). It was 2.30 and the cable car marked our completion of the circle that we started ten days earlier. But I didn’t feel elated. It had been a slog today. I was cold, wet and tired, and we still had a grinding descent to Chamonix on a rough, zigzagging trail. The cable car we had boarded to start our adventure was closed for the season; Planpraz was deserted, and this contributed to the air of dejection.
It took us another hour and a half to descend to Chamonix. As football managers say, we started brightly. A broad track descended from beneath the cable car station and I raced down it, overtaking a couple of other hikers on their way down. Edita was even quicker, and by the time we reached the treeline at 1,600m she was having to stop regularly and wait for me. For the next forest section I counted 16 zigzags on the map, but this knowledge didn’t help me. The trail through forest was steep and knee-jarring; counting from one to 16 as you start to tire isn’t the most uplifting experience. We had done six of the zigzags and were less than half an hour from Chamonix when I had to call a halt so that I could eat my final half of sandwich. We sat on a bend and were promptly overtaken by the same hikers that we’d whizzed past higher up. The food gave me the energy I needed though and I shot past them again when we restarted.
We crossed the Petit Balcon Sud and rejoined our route from the previous day. By 4.15 we were walking into the foyer of our hotel on the banks of the Arve, the river which springs from the glaciers on the northern side of the Mont Blanc massif and snakes its way north into Lake Geneva. As it flows through Chamonix, the river’s milky white waters are confined between high stone walls that cut right through the centre of town. I couldn’t help thinking that this confinement must provide an ever-present flood risk. The river’s constant crashing noise always made me feel cold.
But we had other waters in mind. At 7½ hours in duration, this had been our second longest day of the trip and comfortably the most tiring for me. After a blissful hot shower, we found a cosy basement pub called Bar de Moulin in an alleyway beside the river and enjoyed a couple of pints. We rounded the evening off with a delicious meal in Cap Horn, a spacious barn of a restaurant with a nautical theme.
We didn’t miss the rest day and were happy to have completed the full circuit via the Grand Balcon Sud. It was a satisfying ending to our trip, and we could sleep peacefully.
To view all photos from our trek, see my Tour du Mont Blanc Flickr album.
An “epic” completed..
Congratulations to you both.