Dent du Géant (4013m)

The circus continued on our second day in the Mt Blanc area. After the previous day's aborted attempt we decided to try the same route again instead of going with our original plan of climbing the Tour Ronde North Face. There were a few reasons for this: July is very late in the year for climbing a North face. While this year had unusual conditions and we were cautiously optimistic that it could have worked, looking at the face revealed that crossing the Bergschrund might be an issue and that some sections of the route only had very little snow left. On top of that I had zero intention of experiencing the same kind of idiot traffic jam in a more serious undertaking. So we went up towards the Dent du Géant once more, hoping that an earlier arrival by starting from the hut instead of the cable car would give us a chance of climbing the route in peace.

Early morning view of the objective from our dormitory.

Alpinisti this way. Also everbody else who's drawn by the fame of Mt Blanc...

Just past the Bergschrund.

We had a leisurely late 6am breakfast. Crossing the glacier and negotiating the mixed climbing section at the beginning of the route only took us a little over one and a half hours. Knowledge of the route; going ropeless and improved acclimatization were all helping. When we got to the ledge that marks the beginning of the rock section we encountered a queue of people yet again. At least this time it was progressing - albeit slowly. We still had to wait for nearly an hour, all the while more people showed up and queued behind us. It was already devolving into yet another clusterfuck.

Changing layers of clothing.

Steep no-fall zone all the way to the rock.

I like how you can see the summit literally fore-"shadowed" on the glacier below us. Mt Blanc in the background.

The climb started out orderly enough, but it didn't even last for one or two pitches before people started getting impatient and attempting crazy overtaking maneuvers. Reckless chaos ensued. Parties were climbing stacked four levels deep. Ropes tangling, people (intentionally or not) stealing one another's gear, stepping onto hands and feet, cursing and swearing, overloading anchors by crowding five parties on a single one. Utter madness. At some point we were sandwiched between two mountain guides with their respective clients and one of the guides was practically begging another party to behave and not climb on top of everyone else. No such luck. Some of the guides were themselves part of the problem. They promised their clients a roundtrip from cable car to cable car. This gave them a fairly limited time window in which to complete the climb, so they were trying to overtake and rush their clients and everyone else.

Well tracked snow.

Waiting around for our turn to climb.

Finally progressed to the front of the queue. Arne is already belaying me. I still found the time to take a picture because I had to wait for people to clear the pitch ahead of me.

Once we reached the summit ridge things got even worse. The mountain features a dual summit, you first scale the lower one, then the second, higher one. After which you have to return to a spot between the summits in order to rappel. This meant that we now had traffic in both directions, making things even more chaotic and dangerous. Some parties abandoned their ropes completely and went free solo. Again, one of the more respectable guides was begging them to be safe and follow reasonable climbing practices, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. The mountain comes equipped with two parallel rappel routes (apparently it regularly sees a lot of traffic?). Even so, the rappels turned into another bottleneck. When it was Arne and my turn to rappel, some shoving assholes behind us were making up stories about wives in labor and other such shit to skip the queue.

The queue in the other, the "up" direction.

Massive granite slab.

Arne. Trying to stay warm while waiting around.

By some miracle (and solid climbing and rappel technique practiced on hundreds of outings) we made it back down safely and quickly. All I wanted at that point was to get out of there. If this experience was at all indicative of the Mt Blanc area I'm done with it. I'll happily climb my tier two mountains while ya'll can shove each other off the famous prestige routes, thank you very much. Yes, mountaineering history was written here. And yes, these are some spectacular mountains and climbs. But the spectacle isn't worth it by a long shot. I'm much more proud and much happier with accomplishments like the Nesthorn. Not 4000m (but close), not famous. Not climbed in months and we broke trail all the way instead of waddling up in a queue of guided tourists.

Tracks across tha glacier back to the hut.

More waiting. Feels like that is most of what we did on this climb.

Pretty steep.

Anyway. We did meet some nice people on the mountain as well. Had some good chats with some of the guides and the Italian husband and wife team also returned for a second attempt and made it this time around. Arne was, as always, a super reliable and rock solid climbing partner. We worked efficiently and maintained our safety standards even amongst all the chaos. So that part was great.

Somewhat hard to see, but this guy was just handing out the rope to his lead climber. No attempt at belaying, the lead was free soloing the entire route. The lead was also the biggest asshole on the mountain that day, recklessly climbing over everybody else, even when asked not to.

Crawling mass of people.

Frayed fixed ropes. The mountain would be much nicer if these didn't exist. Would make for more enjoyable and more challenging climbing and hopefully keep some of the more clueless aspirants away.

Unfortunately I failed to take a picture, but one anchor had a metal chain partially melted away and all the nuts and bolts welded together in blobs of metal. Only explanation I can come up with is lightning strikes. If you are the only piece of metal on an exposed ridge, you get electrocuted ;-P

Arne. Waiting for the last pitch to the summit.

Summit!

Rochefort Ridge.

As close as we ever made it to the Madonna statue that marks the summit.

Waiting our turn to rappel.

Waiting our turn to rappel.

The rappels were actually quite steep and fun!

Back at the hut.

Crowds waiting for the cable car. "Waiting" is really the theme of the trip.

Poco Loco burger in Chamonix. The town was overrun with people parading around their mountaineering gear. The Arc'teryx Academy was in full swing.

Dent du Géant (4013m), attempt

After our acclimatization hike on Tuesday, Arne got us a rental car (a brand new electric Volvo! My first longer road trip in an all electric. I'm convinced) on Thursday and we made the long drive first to Chamonix and then to Courmayeur on the Italian side. The plan was to spend a night in the valley, then take the first cable car in the morning to climb the Dent du Géant on Friday and the Tour Ronde North face on Saturday. Even the best laid plans don't survive contact with the enemy and this should prove to be true for us as well.

Dramatic weather over Lac Léman.

Organizing gear in our hotel room.

Floating up.

We arrived late at the Shatush Mont Blanc hotel, conveniently located right at the base station of the Monte Bianco Skyway. Considering that we hadn't done any prior research and booked the hotel via cell phone on the drive there, I think we made a really lucky choice. Not expensive and perfectly adequate for our needs. Breakfast was only served after 8am, so we scrapped our original plan of taking the early 6:30am cable car and enjoyed sweet Italian brioche instead. One needs to have the right priorities!

The "giant's tooth", our objective, clearly visible as the highest point in this image.

On the glacier with Mt Blanc in the background.

Steep section crossing the Bergschrund.

Despite the delay, we made it up the mountain, deposited some of our gear at the Rifugio Torino, and roped up on the glacier ready to go by 9:30 in the morning. Still plenty of time for a fast rope team like us. Several mountain guides in the gondola and at the hut warned their clients and us of strong winds on the mountain. Gusts of 70km/h and more. It still seemed like too good a day to pass up and we proceeded in high spirits.

Arne in action.

Sören.

The abominable traffic jam. The responsible party isn't visible in this image. We spent most of the time on that very ledge at the bottom.

It took us a little over two hours of good progress over the glacier and steep mixed terrain to reach the rock climbing part of the mountain. This is where we expected to make up for lost time, considering how both Arne and I are fast and experienced on rock. Instead we got stopped completely. There was a traffic jam of rope teams blocking the route. It was a fucking ridiculous clown show of epic proportions. The Mt Blanc area is too famous and easily accessible for its own good. It attracts aspiring mountaineers from literally all over the world. Over the two days we spent in the area we talked to a Czech team (drove 12 hours from Prague and headed straight up the mountain, complaining about severe headaches...); a Polish guide (who knew Arne's former manager and Google-colleague-turned-mountain-guide Ilona, the world is a village as they say); Hong Kongese (jet lagged from Hong Kong...); Italians; French; Germans; Welsh; New Zealanders; ... you get the idea. A wild range of experience and ability. I witnessed a guide at the hut explain to his client which direction the climbing harness goes on (!). At the same time you have folks climbing some of the world's hardest routes and attempting new speed records.

Selfie before calling it quits. The yellow helmet behind us is one half of an Italian husband and wife climbing party that we had a good conversation with. They turned around with us. For him, it was the third time he had to bail from this very mountain.

Retracing our steps back down.

Falling is ill advised for most of the route. It is steep and mostly unprotected.

In our particular case we were extremely unlucky. We stood on the starting ledge of the route, wrapped in all our layers (in my case: Merino wool base layer; thick fleece jacket; down jacket; double layer Gore-Tex windbreaker) and were still shivering from the icy winds. Gusts were sufficiently strong to blow you off balance. And nothing moved. We could see and talk to a few parties directly in front of us, but none of them were directly responsible for the complete standstill. One party was in radio contact with another party higher up and they reported a group of four (!) women were completely in over their heads and blocked everything. Nothing we could do but wait. And freeze. And wait. And freeze. And wait some more. Reminded me of the notorious Everest traffic jams. After waiting for more than two and half hours (!!!) and still seeing no progress whatsoever, Arne and I decided to call it quits and turned around. At this point starting up would have been unwise and unsafe and would definitely have made us miss dinner at the hut.

Love this sticker at the hut. Breakfast at every hour starting midnight. The latest (!) breakfast is at 7am ;-P

Two power outlets for 160 people with phones at the hut.

Clouds boiling.

I was super pissed at this "Disneyland for mountaineers". It's hard enough to correctly judge conditions on the mountain; weather; your own ability and energy; manage a schedule and gear without also having to account for the reckless and shitty behavior of random strangers actively making things more dangerous for everybody. I was fucking mad when we got back to the crowded hut. Little did I know at this point that it would get even worse. But that's a post for another day...

In bed by 7pm.

We'll be back. Sooner than you think.

Piz Güglia (3380m)

Arne and I had big plans for later in the week. They involved going up high, so we figured an acclimatization trip was in order. Piz Güglia is easy to get to by driving up the Julier pass and hiking from there. It's usually rated a T4 trail all the way to the summit. The mountain is steep in all aspects, so the trail is exposed but not very difficult. Or so we thought. It turned out we were early in the season (in July! This summer is truly fucked) and large patches of snow made the trail all that much harder, more risky and partially entirely inaccessible. We came prepared and brought crampons and ice axes. We didn't use the former, but the latter came in handy. Given the conditions we had the mountain entirely to ourselves for the first half of the trip. We met a lone hiker at the Fuorcla Albana saddle at 2869m altitude. He had come up from the other side and was sitting around, contemplating whether to continue or not. He ended up following our footsteps and route finding and we summitted together. A czech guy living and working in Pontresina, so this was basically his home turf.

Despite the tricky conditions we completed the round trip in very good time and I made it back in time for dinner and bedtime story with the kids. Both Arne and I felt good and strong for the entire day, so we were ready to continue with our bigger objective. Next time ;-P

A hearty breakfast at the best highway stop I know: Heidiland.

The locals jumping around.

Arne.

Sören.

Quick break.

Arne. Pretending to be excited about the trail. Which was still pretty mellow at this point - albeit protected by wires.

This is starting to get more exciting. Absolute no fall zone.

Me coming up.

Arne. You can see a massive wall of snow in the lower left, blocking the trail. We deemed it impassible, so we scrambled up some random couloir to the ridge. Not knowing whether we'd actually be able to continue there, we made sure we'd always be able to retrace our steps back down the steep unprotected scrambling.

The ridge proved very friendly! Good for us.

Summit!

Trying to stick to the trail for the way back down...

...led us back to the big chunk of snow blocking the way. This time we used our ice tools to chop off the corner and squeeze through via some dicey climbing. Note how exposed this is - falling here would very much make it the last fall of your life.

Me pointing out where we squeezed through and scrambled over.

Long way down.

The czech guy in the foreground. Our ridge and summit in the back.

Back at the saddle. With the dangerous parts behind us, it was mostly eating altitude from this point on.

Surfing down the snow. Fun, but surprisingly tiring.