My head torch attracts swarming clouds of tiny flies, and I take in huge gobfuls of them as I hungrily gulp down air, even if I breath through gritted teeth. At first I try and spit them out, but I can’t afford to waste the precious fluids, so down the hatch they go. I kill some time by wondering how many gnats you’d need to eat to make one calorie.

As I round the corner there is a slight gap in the trees, giving me a brief glimpse of the mountains on the other side of the valley. There is a thin snake of light winding it’s way up the glacier from the Grands Mulets refuge, a string of head torches on their way up Mont Blanc, and suddenly, despite there being 8km and over 2000m of height between us, I don’t feel quite so alone. I wave, but I don’t think anyone waves back. I don’t mind, they probably have other things to think about: a few seconds later there is yet another crack, muffled by distance but still loud, followed by a bass rumbling. I imagine the procession of ski tourers speeding up momentarily, their already-weary legs given fresh vigour by the unmistakeable sound of collapsing seracs, the third one this morning.

There are no seracs here on my side of the valley, the only real danger that I have to face today is time: I simply have to be away from the steepest slopes before the Spring sun has softened the snow too much. As long as I cover the distance that I need to in the coldest part of the day, the risk of avalanche will be negligible.

“So why are you putting that on?” one participant of my internal dialogue smirked condescendingly as I strapped my transceiver on, earlier that morning. “Going to dig yourself out, are you?”

“It’ll look better in the news reports,” comes the dismissive reply, “If it comes to it.”

As I yomp up through the forest from Chamonix towards the Col de Bel Lachat, I am soon sweating in the cool night air and I strip off my thin gloves and sleeves. Despite wearing the heaviest running pack I’ve ever carried, burdened with aluminium crampons and axe, 30m of walking rope, and two litres of lemon-flavoured electrolytes, I am feeling strong and confident, and the only thing slowing me down is the desire to keep a hard-battled breakfast in my stomach, where a pint of acrid coffee and a dry raisin pastry churn and gurgle in protest at the early start. The glowing eyes of ibex peer at me from the darkness when I reach the cliffs below the col, and their owners throw me the occasional desultory snort.

Finally, an hour after leaving town amidst the now-familiar clatter of tungsten-carbide spikes on tarmac, I reach the snowline on the slopes leading up to Le Brevent, and my choice of footwear starts to feel a little less ridiculous. The gaiters and Gore-Tex on my fancy new Salomon Snowcross do their best to keep the worst of the wetness at bay during a few hundred metres of tedious and expletive-laden post-holing through the dieing snowpack, but as I gain altitude and the snow becomes firm enough to support my weight, the built-in studs grip keenly, swift progress is made, and I am soon at the first summit of the day, Le Brevent, with 1500m of ascent behind me, and the indescribably-beautiful moonlit vista of Chamonix and it’s surroundings splayed out in front of me. I allow myself the luxury of a few minutes to drink it all in, but the wind snaps cruelly through my thin clothes, there is already a hint of sunrise over the Aiguille du Tour in the distance, and I have no choice but to keep moving.

After a quick skip down the oft-trodden path to the Breche du Brevent, in just a few short weeks the easily-guessed route to the Col du Brevent will be over loose blocks of gneiss and tumbling scree, hazardous and time-consuming to move over, but for now the well-frozen snow flying by underfoot makes travel quick and easy, and at the col I am faced with the first major decision of the day: to follow the established trail, still under several feet of snow, as it descends to the Brevent midstation and then traverses through the pistes and ski lifts to my next col, a safe, speedy, and predictable route, but one that misses off several important summits; or to explore new ground and follow the very crest of the ridge formed by the Pointe des Vioz, the Clochetons, and the Aiguille du Charlanon. I’ve never taken the second path before and I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’ve got a rope, a short length of rap-tat, and enough time on my hands to solve any problems I encounter. It’s an easy choice and one made quickly, so I munch down a handful of fizzy Orangina sweets and set off up the ridge line.

As we make our way northwards, mostly on the east side of the ridge, there follows a few slanting snowy couloirs, some wide-open bowls, the occasional rocky step, and one or two tufts of grass poking through on the southern-most facing pitches, but route finding is generally easy and intuitive, and I find myself overflowing with a confidence in my abilities. Aware that, at some point, I’ll have to make my way to the west side of the ridge line to avoid the steep ground at the base of the Clochetons, I pick my way up a steep channel between two insignificant little summits, and enjoy the view across the Gorges des Diosaz to the Pointe Noire de Pormenaz as I scramble along until, suddenly, there is an impassable breche between the pinnacle of rock I am on, and the final summit of the Pointe des Vioz. Bugger. I can’t turn around, that would eat up too much time… I’ll try and down-climb this section off to the right, it doesn’t look too bad.

Just a few minutes later, the world around me is ringing with the most offensive vocabulary imaginable, directed towards the splintering rock to which my trembling fingers cling, the crumbling ledges and steep, shifting gravel under my floppy-soled running shoes, the poor decisions that brought me to this point in life, and the fucking idiot who made them. Immediately after, there is a single moment of startling, silent clarity, during a mercifully-brief period of dynamic down-climbing, before my desperately-grasping hands and wildly-skating feet find enough purchase to arrest our increasing momentum. Were it not for an ablutive pit-stop earlier in the morning in an attempt to lighten the load I was carrying, I would almost certainly shit myself out of pure terror at this point. But, once back in constant physical contact with the planet, I open my eyes, reject anew a temporarily-accepted religion, pull myself together, and press on. Down this ramp, up another snow-filled couloir, over a narrow col, and there we are: at the Clochetons, on the easily-traversed west side, just as we had planned all along.



Life is reassuringly-simple for nearly a kilometre as we make our way over wide snowfields and up slightly-steep slopes to the summit of the Aiguille du Charlanon, passing along the way a very interesting-looking couloir whose location has been memorised for next winter. Full daylight is now upon us, and the sheer scale of the mountains surrounding us on all sides can be felt to an astonishing degree. Trailing off to the south-west lies the rolling ridgeline that brought us here, punctuated now and then with the occasional gendarme and summit, culminating in the huge blank wall of Le Brevent’s south-east face, nearly three kilometres away by now. To the north, worryingly-close as it towers over us, lurks the day’s next obstacle, the confused rabble of peaks propping-up the three summits of the Aiguille de la Gliere. Across the valley, still and silent, is a panorama more vast than I have the opportunity to enjoy, because although I yearn for the chance to sit down and lose myself in a view I’ve seen a thousand times before, the day is getting warmer, and I must continue.

Just over a week ago, on another early-morning foray into the Aiguilles Rouges with Chris Cloyd, we stood looking up at the face that I now have to descend. “It’d be easy with skis,” I thought at the time, which isn’t very helpful to me right now, but I remember that most of the terrifyingly-steep snow-slopes directly to my north finish with small but potentially-painful cliffs, so I elect to explore the north-west ridge instead. I am relieved beyond words when I find myself, presently, at the bottom of around thirty metres of quite-exposed but comparatively-easier down-climbing than my previous endeavour, over solid-ish flakes and through corners carpeted with gravel, and I am soon at a wide and comfortable snowy saddle that leads to further rocky steps down the shallow ridge to Col Cornu. I know what my immediate future holds, and I take a few minutes to strap on my blunt and featherlight aluminium crampons.

The journey to the col passes without incident, as does another short ascent to the Aiguille Pourrie, the “Rotten Needle”, so called on account of it crumbling to pieces but for now still safely glued together by the enduring snow, and onwards back down to the Col de la Gliere. This is my final chance to bail before a simple-yet-strenuous climb of three hundred and fifty metres for the next kilometre-and-a-half, up to the Aiguille de la Gliere, but once filled with fruitcake and a couple of cherry-flavoured caffeine sweets I decide that I’m still fairly fit and capable, and set off with a purposeful stride. Having spent more time wandering around here than we would have liked with Dan Fitzgerald over the last year, I have the most direct route through a series of shallow-angled bowls mapped out in my head, but the climb drains my energy and slows me down to a crawl, and the final, steeper slope almost finishes me off.

As I pull myself up onto the ledge at the top, for the first time today I can see the section that has worried me the most: a sun-baked descent down forty degree slopes past the Gendarme Wehrlin, down into the Flegere ski area, where a poorly-timed presence could see you underneath five or six metres of avalanche debris. But after exploring the area shortly after a raging storm with Nick Draper a week earlier, and finding without the least bit of surprise that the whole Gliere bowl had thoroughly purged and shed most of it’s load, I was convinced that there would be hardly anything left up here to slide, and sure enough there is a deep crown line extending along almost the entire top edge of the bowl. “There’s nothing left up here to slide,” I think to myself, without quite believing it, so I say it out loud, as though I really mean it.

I eventually manage to convince myself that it’s safe enough to carry on, but it is with my stomach in my throat that I start to down-climb the snow and traverse across the bowl, towards the couloir next to the gendarme, so I stick to the relative safety of islands of rock as much as I can. But as I poke around in the snow under my feet, the more confidence I gain in the slope’s stability, and once I’ve made my way into the centre of the couloir and the deep runnel carved by last week’s avalanche, I am on solid but creamy snow, the perfect consistency for three hundred metres of smooth glissading down to the moraine. The day, quite suddenly, feels like a roaring success, and a toothy grin spreads across my face.

But all good things must come to an end, and before long I am hunched over my axe halfway-up the climb to the Col des Crochues, gasping for breath and sweat dripping from my nose as a hot sun snarls angrily at my back. The day is taking its toll.

“I’m not doing the Belvedere as well,” I wheeze, collapsing onto the first comfortable-enough rock that presents itself at the col, snipping the final objective, staring down at me from across the Combe de la Balme, from today’s itinerary. My legs are too short and the snow is too wet, and I still have to run down at least fourteen hundred metres of altitude to get home. But before we can even consider the idea of hot showers and cold beers, first we have to cross the final and most technically-challenging obstacle of the day, the traverse of the Crochues, with a few moves of actual climbing and some terrifically-exposed sections over precipitous cliffs. I shove the last of my Orangina sweets and caffeine chews into my gob and make my way towards the first crux pitch, a thirty metre chimney of 3c climbing which, at this time of year, is still filled with snow. Once at the top, some easy ground over the west side of the ridge leads to a narrow breche that opens onto a short, narrow ledge facing east, from which you then make a 15m rappel back to the west. In sensible shoes you could quite reasonably down-climb this section, as I have done in the past, but to do that today would mean carrying the rope all this way for absolutely nothing, so I wrap a narrow sling around my buttocks to form a rudimentary harness and swing out to do battle with the ropes gnomes.

Once the rope is again coiled and thrown over my shoulder, we climb up a wide corner back onto the east side of the ridge, where we are greeted by a rushing wind and a sickening drop, a narrow ledge and a steep slab which is made no easier by being covered with sugary, crumbling snow, and then finally a series of easy blocks and a snow slope up to the first summit. Seventeen kilometres and 2400m of ascent after leaving Chamonix that morning, I pour myself onto a flat, comfortable rock, and concentrate very hard on not moving at all. The world around me is silent except for the occasional insistent breath of wind, and stays that way for several minutes, until two choughs appear and hover over me, riding the swirling breeze, chirping loudly. I chirp back.





But it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done this traverse and I’ve obviously forgotten just how much of it is left, because there are still a few quite involving sections of terrain before I can start sprinting down the Glacier des Dards, and I am soon cursing angrily at every single rock I see. I feel bad, it’s not their fault. I’m just tired.

The second summit of the Crochues appears, finally, and just beyond it, nearly two kilometres of crotch-deep post-holing through sodden snow down to Lac Blanc, where, thank god, there is rock and earth and solid ground that supports my weight. The rocks part to provide a path, the path leads to ladders through cliffs, the cliffs turn into forest, and the forest thins and becomes shops and houses, a front door, a fridge door, a beer, and a sofa.

The route:

Chamonix > Bel Lachat > Le Brevent > Col du Brevent > Pointe des Vioz > Aiguille du Charlanon > Col Cornu > Aiguille Pourrie > Col de la Gliere > Aiguille de la Gliere > Col des Crochues > Aiguilles Crochues > Lac Blanc > Argentiere

25km distance, 2400m ascent

I thought I’d try and make a bit of a video documentary of today’s route. It isn’t very well documented, and the footage at the start is barely even video, but until GoPro send me a fancy new camera, this is the best I’m able to work with.