Chamonix - To the grandeur of the Alps.

I left school at seventeen with just enough Highers to get me into Aberdeen University. Why I signed up for another four years of education (or five as it turned out, ahem…) when I’d been so desperate to leave school is something that puzzles me still. I have since worked out that for the same money as getting a degree in Mundanity at the University of Grey Skies and Freezing Winds, I could have gone to Calgary and learned how to do the luge. Given that Great Britain is not famous for its proliferation of lugists, I am fairly confident I could have made the British Olympic Team.* Now that would be something to tell girls and put on job applications…
Staggering euphorically out of school with the ink still wet on my UCCA form, I realised I had six glorious months of freedom before I had to be a student. More importantly, I had six months to save up the money I needed to go to the Alps.

Within weeks, I had got a job with Stirling District Council Roads Dept. and was loafing and skiving my way to a holiday fund. At the weekends I went rock climbing and hill-walking, or ‘training for the Alps’ as it came to be known. It was a beautiful summer that year and, what with working outdoors and being in the hills every weekend, I developed the first (and probably last) really good sun-tan of my life. By the middle of August, all preparation was complete. Myself and six friends boarded the bus for Chamonix.
Thirty-two hours we were on that bus. Thirty-two hours from Stirling to Chamonix. Thirty-two of the longest and most boring hours of my life. I discovered that a Sony Walkman accompanied by two Pogues compilation tapes, The Joshua Tree, Yo! Bum Rush the Show and Tougher Than Leather can stave off boredom for about three hours. A copy of Viz passes another hour. Inspecting my sandwiches – two minutes. Discussing with my friends the relative merits of our sandwiches, another six minutes. Eating my sandwiches - around 30 seconds. Which left 27 hours, 51 minutes and 30 seconds to do nothing but stare out the window trying not to look at my watch.
We got there eventually, however. Older, wiser and massaging aching buttocks perhaps, but we got there. We sat at a table outside a café in the main square. It was cloudy, so we couldn’t see the mountains, but it was great to be there. The adventure had begun, there was no stopping it now. There was something very humbling about being in Chamonix: the undisputed centre of Alpine climbing. Nowhere else in the world could claim quite such a distinguished mountaineering heritage. Pretty much every notable climber the world had ever known had probably sat in this square at some point, sipping a beer and watching the world go by. From the first tigers – Whymper and Balmat; through Bonatti, Whillans and Bonnington, to the current crop of extreme alpinists – Profit, Destivelle, and Tardivel.
As we sat there, sucking on our Kronenbourgs, the clouds parted a little. Not much; just a small tear in the thick, grey blanket, but it was enough. For a few brief moments the needle like spire of the Aguille du Midi had appeared above us. We were silenced. No mountain we had ever seen had been so steep, so viciously ragged - or so incredibly, absurdly high.
That trip to the Alps was a phenomenal experience, it lived up to my dreams in every respect and threw some unexpected pleasures our way as well. It was our first trip abroad without ‘responsible adults’ (Gordon, at 22, didn’t really count) and the sense of freedom was extraordinary. We could do what we wanted, when we wanted. There was no-one to tell us what we couldn’t do. We rock climbed in the valley, went swimming, bivvied out on the Brevent ridge, practised our glacier technique on the Glacier des Bossons and even climbed a few mountains. We knocked off the Petit Aiguille Verte and made a failed attempt on Mont Blanc, but the mountain that really summed up the Alpine experience for me was Mont Blanc du Tacul.
We got up at 6.30 am (an impressive feat in itself for an 18-year-old) in order to catch the early cable car up the Aiguille du Midi. The only noises to break the serene hush of that early morning on the camp-site were our excited whispers and the clink-clunk-clank of climbing gear being loaded into bulging rucksacks. Over our heads, the sky was the clear pale blue of an alpine dawn. A hurried breakfast of muesli and coke and we were off, striding through Chamonix on our way to climb a mountain.
The cable car was crammed with climbers, rucksacks and skiers with touring equipment. My friends and me were the most visibly excited of the occupants; but despite the languid facade of the local alpinists, the same sparkle of anticipation shone in their eyes. We all felt the same thrill, the same trepidation, the same impatience to be on the mountain: if we hadn’t – we would not have been there.
When the cable car finally reached the top of the mountain, we stepped out into a tunnel which was like something out of a James Bond film - all pipes and whirring noises and men in overalls. Passing through the cable car station we then came out of another tunnel into the ‘ice cave’. The mouth of the ice cave led out onto a precipitous ridge, which in turn led down on to the Col du Plan; a huge expanse of snow surrounded by vast peaks of ice and rock.
The air was still and cold and noticeably thinner. I could feel myself taking ever so slightly longer and deeper breaths as my body strove to take in the oxygen it needed. Above, the sky was the deepest blue I had ever seen. With less atmosphere to get in the way, it was closer to the colour of space.
After this momentary reflection on the beauty of my surroundings I threw off my rucksack and eagerly pulled out the gear I needed – crampons, ice axe, harness, rope, ice screws, prussick loops. Pulling on my harness and strapping on my crampons, I clipped my glacier rescue gear to the loops on my harness and tied into one end of the rope, tossing the coils to Evan, who was next to tie in. Once he was tied in, he passed the coils to Chris, who tied in to the other end. Looking across at the others I saw that they were also ready. Ready to descend the knife-like ridge to the glacier below and to ascend an alpine mountain 13,936 feet high!
Just as we were about to step out onto the ridge, an excited babbling came echoing from the tunnel. Looking round, we saw a Japanese tourist clad in trainers, a yellow jumpsuit and Mickey Mouse ear-muffs, running full-pelt down the tunnel waving his camera in front of him. He was clearly excited by the altitude, by the view and by the awesome nature of his surroundings. He was also clearly unaware that the broad concrete walkway ended abruptly in an icy shelf which led in turn onto a narrow ridge with a drop of several hundred feet on one side – and several thousand on the other.
We watched in horrified fascination as he ran into the ice-cave. In slow motion, it seemed, he lost his footing on the ice. He lurched - swinging his arms in a blurred and hopeless windmill motion, striving to retain his balance. He tried to stop – running backwards in a comic flailing of arms and legs. I saw the toothy grin disappear, replaced by a look of sheer terror, as he swept out of the ice-cave and onto the ridge. I was convinced I was about to watch a man fall to his death.
He didn’t die. Somehow he managed to stay on the ridge – sliding in a screaming crouch, fingers clawing at the hard packed snow, feet splayed in a desperate attempt to slow his progress. He came to a stop a few yards down the ridge, to lie clinging to it for a few seconds, staring down at Chamonix, thousands of feet below. Slowly, he regained his composure, and then, looking extremely sheepish, crawled back to the ice cave to receive the deafening brunt of his wife’s contempt. Me and the boys laughed and laughed hard, but it was relief, not humour. There’s nothing like watching a man die to put a damper on your day.
We stepped out of the shade of the ice-cave into the stunning brilliance of the day, our heart-rates slowly returning to normal. Raising my glacier glasses briefly I was amazed at the crushing intensity of the sunlight reflecting off the snow. I was damn glad of my glasses and my factor 50 sunblock. We crunched down the ridge, being careful not to catch our crampons in the rope. In a few minutes we were on the Col du Plan and heading straight for the towering pyramid of Mont Blanc du Tacul.
We could see two sides of the mountain from our approach route. To the left was a steep jumble of cliffs, covered with narrow ribbons of blue ice; to the right was a steep slope of snow, smooth save for a few places where the surface had cracked into deep crevasses. We were heading for the right hand side, it should be fairly straightforward as long as we could get over those crevasses.
We walked across the glacial plain, towards our destination, dwarfed by the enormous mountains around us. The world was deep blue, bright white and granite grey. Mont Blanc du Tacul seemed to grow in stature the closer we got. What had seemed like a reasonable days outing from the Aiguille du Midi, loomed darkly above us, blotting out the sun, as we stood on its lower slopes.
Stepping into the shade of the mountain, the temperature dropped sharply and we pulled fleeces and Gore-Tex on over our thermals. Out in the sun, on the open space of the Col du Plan, it had felt almost ridiculously balmy - a Sunday stroll in the summer sunshine. Here, in the darkness under the Tacul’s cliff’s, our breath hung in the air in frigid clouds and the cold pinched at our ears and fingers. We got moving quickly, the temperature did not encourage inactivity.
We cramponed slowly up the steep neve towards the summit high above. It was hard work, unused as we were to the altitude, but technically straightforward – just a simple slog up steep snow. About half-way up we came to a crevasse that we could not bypass without a huge detour, and decided to climb over it. It wasn’t especially wide, just a short jump of a few feet, and we were roped to our friends for safety. Staring down that seemingly bottomless crevasse, however, I could feel my heart beating against my ribs. I had stared down innumerable cliffs in my time, some of them hundreds of feet high, but there was something altogether more disturbing about this dark hole in the ice. Something about disappearing forever into the deep blue depths of the glacier was far more frightening than falling off a cliff onto the rocks below. I took a deep breath and jumped.
My crampons bit into the hard snow on the other side of the crevasse with a satisfying crunch. At the same time, I swung my ice-axe, burying its pick up to the shaft. No problem at all – dunno what I was worried about! I couldn’t help grinning back at my mates on the other side of the crevasse before advancing a few yards to sit in the snow and wrap the rope around me in a body belay. Taking up the slack, I nodded to Evan, who leapt effortlessly across the crevasse. Shortly after, Chris was over as well and within minutes the whole party was safely on the other side.
Right at the top of Mont Blanc du Tacul is a rocky outcrop – the final step before reaching the summit. Clambering up, we finally came out of the shadow and felt the warmth of the sun washing over our faces and soaking into our chilled bodies. Above us the sky was an unbroken dome of blue so dark it looked almost black. All around us, in serried ranks, were the Alps. Thousands of hulking, jagged, broken and soaring peaks, crowned with pure-white mantles of sparkling snow. It remains one of the most spectacular landscapes I have ever seen.
We stayed there for a while, relaxing after the climb and eating our lunch (cosmopolitan fare – Baguettes, Brie and Irn Bru brought from Scotland). Our success had given us the confidence to dream and we searched the horizon for future conquests. Perhaps one day we would climb Mont Maudit and Mont Blanc or maybe the Aiguille du Plan? Perhaps one day, who knew, we’d even find ourselves on the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses?
Whatever the future held, one thing was for sure – there were plenty of mountains to climb. Feeling a little light headed with the altitude and the grandeur of our experience, we began our return to Chamonix. We had earned our steak et frites.

*This confidence is, admittedly, based on nothing. I have no more than average sporting ability.