TOP OF THE WORLD MA! (WELL EUROPE AT LEAST) Well guys here I am safely home in sunny Barrowford and already the memories of the effort of the other week are dimming in my mind Mont Blanc, not so bad. Err just hang on a minute there. Actually it was tough, very, very tough! My week in the Alps started by climbing to the highest point in Italy, Gran Paradiso at 4061m (13,323ft) and staying a couple of nights in mountain refuges to acclimatise. On The Summit of Grand Paradiso Thus with the preliminaries out of the way my Mont Blanc summit attempt began on a bright Sunday morning with a jolly train ride up to the Nid D Aigle (Eagles Nest) from Le Fayet due to the téléphérique being out of action. This was followed by an easy 2-3 hour walk up to the Tête Rousse refuge at 3167m for an overnight stay, a height gain of about 800m. Summit day itself duly started by waking up at 1am after about 2 hours sleep (try sleeping in a bunkhouse with 18 other blokes and see how much you sleep), followed by trying my best to eat the crap breakfast offered up despite not wanting to eat anything due to the altitude and the ungodly hour! Lets face it these French need to understand what breakfast is all about. I mean a few bits of bread and
jam and some yoghurt are no substitute to a good bowl of porridge before a long day in the hills! Anyway at about 2am it was out into the cold dark night to climb the up the side of the Grand Couloir as shown in the picture below up to the new Goûter hut at 3817m. Our Route Up The Side Of The 'Grand' Couloir The Goûter hut is in fact most peoples start point with the majority having climbed to it the day before from Tête Rousse and to give you a sense of scale it s a 5-6 storey building! However in order to miss the crowds our guides elected to stay at the Tête Rousse hut and attempt the summit direct from there. This meant a much longer day, starting & finishing with a big climb (up and down) but we were assured it was the better option and we would have more chance of having the summit to ourselves. Still the couloir had to be done, still half asleep, in the dark, wearing a head-torch, crampons and with all your kit, 650m (2132ft) and virtually straight up, welcome to Mont Blanc! Add to this the fact that our Italian guide Andreas, my Aussie teammate Keith and myself were by now also roped together and it was a bit of a struggle. However I must
admit when a huge avalanche went off somewhere to our right about 3/4 of the way up (possibly on the Bionnassy glacier) it woke me up sharpish! But it was soon over and once we reached the hut we had a quick 15 minute break to try to recover a bit before setting off on the rest of the 'walk'. Stage 2 of the ascent is up to the Dome de Goûter and is what should be a fairly easy height gain of about 500m which in the lakes would be a walk in the park. However with the thinner air at this altitude it seemed to take forever and which saps you more and more with each step. We actually finally crested the dome just as the sun was breaking through. A welcome bit of warmth after the freezing night air. But the euphoria of seeing the sun was short-lived when it became apparent that what looked like about half the height we had just struggled for hours to gain we were now going to lose descending into the Col du Goûter. Add to this the first clear vision of the crest to the summit and I'll be honest I could quite easily have turned back there and then! Cresting The Dome De Goûter With Vallot & The Summit Ridges Beyond Anyway I battled my mental demons (what do you mean you always
knew I was mental?) and so we pushed on with our next stop at the Vallot emergency hut at 4362m (you can just about see it in the image above) as I couldn't feel the toes on my left foot and my guide wanted to check them. Yep all there and no frostbite so all good to go again, just the simple matter of the 'Bosses' and the summit ridge to go. Again, in the Lakes this 1500ft climb would be a doddle however by now the wind had also picked up and when you have to walk on a ridge which is no more than a couple of feet wide with 7-8000ft drops on both sides it gets a bit unnerving! In a strange sort of way my tiredness helped at this point as I really couldn't be bothered with the drop offs as all I was set on doing was putting one foot in front of another! By now the pace had slowed to a relentlessly slow plod, plod, plod where time seemed to disappear but then suddenly the crest widened out and I was there, the summit of Mont Blanc, highest point in Western Europe at 4810m (15780ft)! Sadly our excruciatingly slow pace meant that we were afforded no more than perhaps 5-10 minutes on the summit as our weather window was rapidly diminishing and the threat of afternoon storms was becoming very real. About 11 hours up for 10 minutes on top of Europe, it didn't seem much of a fair swap but I wouldn't have changed it for the world. Cue some rapid camera action (hence the state of the summit image) before getting ready to repeat the whole process in reverse. Keith & Myself On The Summit Of Mont Blanc
The walk (substitute slog) down was pretty uneventful apart from the clouds coming in as we re-crossed the Col de Goûter but thankfully Andreas knew the way and after a further 4 hours or so we were back at the Goûter hut having a 45 minute break and something warm to eat before having to attempt to down-climb the couloir back to Tête Rousse, something I was not looking forward to after being on my feet for what felt like forever. Oddly the break gave me the strength to actually enjoy the descent and so after some 16+ hours we finally arrived back at Tête Rousse for a well-earned meal and a cold beer, something the French can do! (Plus a shot of 12 year old single malt which one of my teammates had dragged with him to the hut... result!) Now I know this is all of a bit of a ramble but I wanted people to appreciate a little of what it takes to climb this thing and therefore why I felt it worth asking for donations to charity. Adventures like this come around very rarely (possibly only once if my wife Louise has anything to do with it!) and as such I really do feel that every effort should be made to make them as worthwhile as possible on all fronts. Frankly, given that so much was out of my control on the trip I couldn't have wished for it to have gone better. Thankfully the weather just about held and the storms didn't materialize, I didn't succumb to altitude sickness at all (a miracle considering I have never been above 4200ft before) and my strength held out (although it didn't feel like it at the time) and consequently I feel I held up my end of the bargain. So to all those of you who have already sponsored me, a big, big wholehearted thank you from both myself and the respective charities! And for those who haven't (as yet?) the two just giving pages remain open and can be accessed by pasting the links below into Google or similar. Thanks again for listening, Phill Larter (AKA the short, fat, balded headed bloke) http://www.justgiving.com/phillip-larter1 http://www.justgiving.com/phillip-larter2