My ears are suddenly filled with a familiar but despised tune. After finishing work late last night, today’s alarm is a particularly tempting one to ignore. “Just turn it off and go back to sleep,” the darkest corners of my brain murmur soothingly, but loudly, trying to drown it out. With a pathetic whimper, I pull on my dressing gown and stumble down to the kitchen to put on the coffee and porridge. The dog greets me at the bottom of the stairs before squeezing past, he’s on a mission to keep my side of the bed warm. The poor thing doesn’t yet know that he’s coming as well today.

Buoyed by the success of last week’s exploratory excursion deep into the heart of the Aiguilles Rouges, and encouraged but a little confused that someone else thought it looked like fun, today there are four pairs of legs headed up into the snow. Mine and Baldric’s, trotting up from Argentiere through the Bois de la Trappe, are the first to arrive at our rendezvous point at the Flegere midstation, and we sit down to wait for legs seven and eight, owned by willing-and-able volunteer Chris Cloyd, as they journey up from Chamonix. Pressed into the doorway of the closed ski lift for shelter from the weak-but-painful morning breeze as it bites through my thin running clothes, there is a perfect silence except for the twittering of wagtails sorting through the gravel, an occasional distant cuckoo, and the indignant snorting of a nearby chamois. The mountains above us glow gold in the freshly-risen sun. The hated alarm that so rudely started my day is not forgotten, but forgiven.

Chris arrives, and as we set off up the shrinking ribbon of snow on the Pylones piste, weaving its way up the mountain under the closed chairlift, we alternate between discussing our options and gasping for breath. In town for only a few days, Chris doesn’t mind where we go, it’s all new for him. “Let’s get weird…” was the brief. Righto!

The currently clear skies are an assuring contrast to the rain clouds and thunderstorms we’ve been promised for later in the day, but all the same we decide to play it safe and opt for a slightly lower-level traverse with more opportunities to bail if things get a little bit too exciting. With ice axes in hand, we cross the col underneath the Index and descend into the Combe Lachenal, a slight gradient coupled with an unpredictable snow surface making progress slower than would be ideal. We see the first shreds of the summer walking trail poking through the retreating snow, and use them as a cue to traverse across into the Combe de la Gliere, crossing a terrifyingly-huge patch of avalanche debris dropped from the Gliere’s south couloir, above us to the right. We are too early in the day for any fresh avalanches to be of much concern, but there is always an aura of menace when hanging around in slide paths, so we lift our knees as best we can, until we reach the flatter ground at the base of the combe.

By the time we reach the final steep climb up to the col at the back wall of the combe, the sun has already softened the snow beneath us, and we find ourselves swimming up through sugar towards stepping stone islands of rock, which provides a more exciting but easier finish to the ascent. Perched on our little atolls in a sea of white, we lurk for a few minutes to take on fluids and absorb the energy from our surroundings – an incredible panorama, the Verte and Drus and the Aiguilles du Chardonnet and Argentiere to our south, the limestone fortress of the Rochers des Fiz to the north, the sprawling peaks of the Aiguilles Rouges to either side of us, and the whole lot soaring above the churning clouds that tear through the valley far below us. We forget, momentarily, the physical effort of the 1600m of climbing we’ve just endured to get here, and enjoy the perfect peace and solitude of the mountains.





But alas, we can linger no longer, because although we now have a short but steep and slightly-involving traverse across cold, safe snow on the north side of the Aiguilles Rouges to the Col du Lac Cornu, we have to keep in mind our descent back to the Brevent ski area, through snow on the sunny, south side of the hill, which is soaking up the sun’s heat with every second that passes, getting warmer, wetter, and heavier. We press on, and are soon post-holing our way down through more sugar to the firmer snow of the Cornu piste, where for the first time today, we can speed things up a notch and let rip, and we enjoy a few kilometres of actual running downhill before our final, mercifully-short climb of the day up the Blanchots piste to the Brevent midstation, and finally, the steep-and-technical descent of the Vertical Kilometre, back home to a hot shower and a quick nap before work.

Thanks for a top morning in the mountains Chris, looking forward to the next adventure.

(I’m currently in training for the Mont Blanc 80km, which I’m running to raise money for the North West Hospice. Please, please consider donating at http://www.mycharity.ie/event/mb80km. Thanks.)