Surprises of an Amatueur Mountaineer

Our middle child (often referred to here as MC), Jim, is a climber and submitted this, the first guest post here. This is as close as I will get to climbing a mountain. We hope you enjoy it.

The Mont Blanc above Chamonix, France

Stuff I Didn’t Expect

     

             I recently took my first tiptoes into serious mountaineering.  I’ve been reading about mountaineering and alpinism since junior high but I’ve never done any serious climbing and a lot of things simply don’t translate.  I was in for a ton of surprises and they started from the minute I arrived in Chamonix, France at the base of Mont Blanc.

The Scale

            I’ve never been under a real mountain before.  Jon Krakauer described the Mont Blanc (4810m) as a mountain of Himalayan proportions.  He wasn’t lying.  The second I saw the massif, caked in thick snow and taller than anything I’d ever seen, I suddenly had some very real second thoughts.  Nothing had prepared me for how BIG this world was and now I was surrounded by it.  The Chamonix valley is bordered by the Mont Blanc massif on one side and the Aquille Rouge on the other.  The Mont Blanc sat far back from the ridge and is partially obscured from the valley floor by the Dome du Gouter, itself a mountain over 4000m tall.  Clearly in view is the Bosson glacier, a massive icefall that sits in an enormous draw on the ridge and serves to scare the living piss out of novice climbers who are clearly in over their heads.  I had been hungry when I arrived in Cham; my hunger quickly disappeared and was replaced with some serious misgivings.

            Throughout the trip, I was awestruck by the scale of everything around us.  On our first day, we learned ice axe and crampon (see below for the explanation of the hilariously named “Crampon”) techniques…on a moving river of ice known as the Mer de Glace.  In a week of firsts, I got to check “Walk on a glacier” off my bucket list.  The Mer de Glace flows around some truly impressive Alpine mountains written into the lore of mountaineering.  Laying eyes on the Grande Jorasses and the Dru was worth the price of admission.  But everything was so big and I suddenly realized I was using an impossibly large ruler against which to measure my tolerance for doing stupid things.  Just kidding, my tolerance for doing stupid things is unlimited.

            Seeing these mountains that I’d been reading about and had known only in pictures reminded me oddly of childhood.  You know how when you’re a kid and something is unpleasant or scary you look on it with such fear that it literally becomes a monster?  It could be a teacher or the dentist or green beans (another story for another day).  Then you grow up and you realize they aren’t really big, bad monsters.  Well, see, I’d grown up only to realize the mountains in my mind weren’t the monsters I thought they were.  They were a hell of a lot bigger and scarier than I’d ever imagined.  Somehow that made the trip better.  I needed the fear because without a healthy amount of fear I wouldn’t have respected the mountains and if I didn’t respect the undertaking it would become just another faded memory that would soon leave me.  Unexpectedly, I had stumbled into a formative experience, which was emphasized on day one by the scale of the problem in front of me.  I look at pictures now and they don’t do justice to the terrain.  But here’s one picture just to illustrate how I felt the first time I saw the Mont Blanc.

The Gear

            I LOVE GEAR!!!  Going to an REI is like going to a candy store, which I also love.  Why do I need an ice axe?  Why wouldn’t I need one!?!  This trip was a thinly-veiled reason to buy a bunch of coats and bags and boots and stuff to climb mountains with and nothing else.

            All joking aside (I wasn’t joking; I really love gear), learning skills I needed to become a mountaineer for a few days was daunting.  I’ve read a lot of books (now I’m just bragging) that describe technique but until you strap on your crampons and kick them into the snow and ice you don’t get it.  Which brings me to crampons.  Crampons are a series of 12 spikes that strap to the bottom of your boots and give you purchase on ice, deep snow, and even mixed terrain.  Crampon skills are a must for alpine-style climbing.  They’re actually pretty cool; like strapping 24 short knives to your feet.  But the first time I wore them was like the first time I tried on high heels.  Please don’t ask me how I know to make the comparison.

            Crampons grip ice and snow best when your toes are pointed downhill, which means they’re most effective when you’re walking downhill.  Occasionally mountaineering requires you to climb up.  So on steep ice slopes you side step slowly upwards.  When you plant your feet you point your toes downhill even as you side step upwards.  Also, try not to snag these little daggers on your pants as you cross your legs and crab your way up a mountain.  If this sounds like awkwardly dancing with your grade school crush then you’re starting to pick up on the concept except instead of stepping on her toes, you’ll catch your pants and go careening down into the cold abyss of inevitable failure.  So only moderately more embarrassing.

            We learned crampon techniques, ice axe techniques, scrambling up steep and often loose rocks, and even how to do all this while roped to three other men.  We were drinking from the fire hose and the snow defeated two of our teammates before we even started up for our summit bid.  It took me a while to learn and I can’t claim to have mastered any of these skills, but the steep learning curve was a real shock.  Still, there was nothing like learning to crampon and self-arrest with an ice axe under the Dent du Geant, another mythic mountain, on the Vallee Blanche, another amazing glacier.

The Danger
 

            Mountaineering is dangerous.  I’ll wait for you all to finish saying “No shit!” Everyone done?  Good.  This year especially showed the dangers as sixteen Sherpa were killed in an avalanche in Everest’s Khumbu Ice Fall.  In another unheard of event, six clients and guides from Alpine Ascents International died on the Liberty Ridge of Mount Rainier.  The climbs they were making were quite a bit more dangerous than climbing the Mont Blanc but danger always exists.

            I don’t typically feel a fear of heights but I quickly got uncomfortable up high.  The second day, we had the option of hiking down a steep and exposed snow slope.  Looking back, I wished I’d sucked it up and done it, but at the time I didn’t feel confident in my crampon abilities to safely execute the ridge.  It was narrow, barely two feet across, and on the left you could look down over 3000m to Chamonix below.  We opted to take another route.  On the Vallee Blanche, I was roped to guide Jonathan when he stopped and told us all to skirt around him to the right because “…there’s a pretty big crevasse to the left.”  I read Touching the Void many years ago and the idea of sliding into a crevasse doesn’t appeal, even if my rope team would simply end up plucking me out.

            Probably one of the scariest experiences was on the hike to the Tete Rouse Hut where we would start our summit bid.  The mountain was heavy with snowfall and the snow line was far lower than expected.  On a neighboring mountain, the Bionnassay, we could see large seracs or ice cliffs, the size of suburban houses and hotels.  Suddenly, one came off sending tons of ice down the Bionnassay to the glacier below.  This was my first avalanche and it did not disappoint.  I tried to snap a few photos but I didn’t get it in time.  The rumbling that sounded like thunder, the massive cloud of snow and ice kicked up, the clatter that blocks of ice made when they made contact with the glacier; scary doesn’t even begin to describe it despite the fact that there was literally no danger to us from anything on the other mountain.  It pushed home the idea that what we were doing had very, very real consequences for failure.

My Decision
 

            The day before summit day I was feeling bad.  I wasn’t feeling weak, but I had a headache, an upset stomach, and I couldn’t get my breathing right.  I became dizzy and slowed down even more.  Guide Jonathan decided to tie me to him with a rope just to make sure I didn’t slide off the narrow trail.  At the hut, I did everything I could to try and remedy the issue.  I drank two VERY expensive Gatorades, I ate a sandwich and drank a Sprite, I even did a bunch of push-ups.  Nothing helped.  Jonathan sat me down and explained the danger of pushing forward if I felt badly.  But I hadn’t come all this way to quit at the hut.

            The next morning we left at 0400.  I wasn’t feeling well and barely got all my coffee and a piece of bread down.  Out of the gate, I knew I hadn’t gotten better over night.  Roped to my own guide, Mike, we were the second rope team of the AAI group on the trail that morning.  It was still dark and I could only see the trail in my headlamp and Mike ahead of me.  The first bit is an easy climb that leads to a difficult  traverse of a section called “The Grand Couloir.”  The Grand Couloir is basically a vertical trench that channels rock fall.  The Alps are an old mountain range and the rock is loose and deteriorating.  Snow and ice work into the gaps between the rocks and freezes, pushing loose rock out.  But this means whenever the ice melts sections of the mountain like the Grand Couloir experience severe rockfall, normally every afternoon.  By going in the morning we had reduced this risk.  After the Grand Couloir, you ascend a rock face of steep, loose rock.  Once you cross the GC you are committing to the mountain.

            Forty-five minutes out of the hut I stopped and started throwing up my coffee.  I couldn’t stop, almost as if I’d just run a six-minute mile.  I slowly got back up and we pushed on to the entrance of the GC.  Mike wasn’t going to turn me around and I probably could have gotten to the next hut fine.  But I abruptly realized I was being affected by the altitude and going higher would only make things worse.  Not wanting to suddenly lose my strength somewhere I couldn’t get out of, I made the decision to turn around.  It was my decision; no one made it for me, and if I had to make it 100 more times, I’d make the same call.  Turning around was the right call.  But I hated it.  I hated slowly slipping back to the hut and pulling off my crampons.  I hated lying down and having the Hut people bring me tea to make me feel better and settle my stomach.  I hated turning around.

            But that’s not the point.  A younger me would have pushed through it and I might have ended up taking a ride to Chamonix in a helicopter.  Maybe it was the danger or the scale mentioned above that made me understand that I wasn’t playing in my own sand box.  I don’t know.  Whatever it was, I realized that the day was not mine.  It wasn’t anyone else’s day either.  My teammates were defeated by high winds just 400m from the summit.  I believe I made the right call for myself, for my body, and for my rope-mate.

Beauty

             

             Pictures don’t do it justice.  Words cannot describe Chamonix and Mont Blanc.  My sister sent me poetry written by Shelley describing his feeling on seeing the Mont Blanc.  It didn’t even come close.  In the French Alps exists a beauty that must be experienced.  I look at the pictures even now and only feel a desire to go back, climb high, and see it all again.

            I don’t cry at movies and it’s rare I’m so moved by emotion to let a tear out.  It’s never happened looking at a painting, sculpture, or even great architecture.  I’ve rarely read a book that tugged at my heartstrings.  I can pretty easily divorce myself from deep emotions when dealing with art because often I just don’t get it.

            But up high, standing on a narrow ledge, sipping water and eating a granola bar, I breathed in deeply of the thinning air and as I let it out slowly I noticed tears rolling out from behind my glacier glasses.  This was surprising.  I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular.  I was just looking out and seeing white mountains below us.  I was roped to a climbing team, kicking my crampons into ice and snow, and burying my ice axe to give me leverage towards an elusive and, ultimately, unattainable goal.  I couldn’t read about this feeling, I couldn’t have someone explain it to me.  I was suddenly here where I’d wanted to be for so long and the beauty of the surroundings, the situation, the reality struck me in a way I never expected.

            It happened again on the Brevant.  We were climbing top-roped behind a guide on an exposed route that was literally the coolest and probably easiest climbing I’ve ever done.  But after ten seconds of looking around I was moved to tears again.  I love being in the mountains, novice though I am.  All the surprises combined to make me realize that I’m not a great climber, probably never will be, but I want to go climb anyway.

            Not being a writer and being fairly incapable of complex or lyric thought I feel the allure of climbing is best described by the Dean of American climbing authors, David Roberts, in his book The Mountain of my Fear.  Roberts, on reaching the summit of Mount Huntington, describes the experience:

            There was no one to tell about it.  There was, perhaps, nothing to tell.   
            All the world we could see lay motionless in the muted splendor of 
            sunrise.  Nothing stirred, only we lived; even the wind had forgotten 
            us.  Had we been able to hear a bird calling from some  pine tree, or 
            sheep bleating in some valley, the summit stillness would have been
            familiar; now it was different, perfect.  It was as if the world had held 
            its breath for us...We photographed each other and the views, trying 
            even as we took the pictures to impress the sight on our memories 
            more indelibly than the cameras could on the film.  If only this 
            moment could last, I thought, if no longer than we do.  But I knew  
            even then that we would forget, that someday all I should remember 
            would be the memories themselves, rehearsed like an archaic dance; 
            that I should stare at the pictures and try to get back inside them, 
            reaching out for something that had slipped out of my hands and spilled
            in the darkness of the past.  And that someday I might be so old that all
            that might pierce my senility would be the vague heartpang of 
            something lost and inexplicably sacred, maybe not even the name 
            Huntington meaning anything to me, nor the names of three friends, but 
            only the precious sweetness leaving its faint taste mingled with the bitter 
            one of dying.

            So someday soon I’ll be squaring up with the Mont Blanc for a rematch and maybe some other mountains too.  Who knows?  I know there will be tons of surprises to come and I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.

Jim Finn, guest writer training prior to climb

Bossons Glacier, Chamonix

Mer de Glace with the Grand Jorasses behind

 

The Grand Couloir

 

Massif is prone to afternoon storms

Tete Rouse hut above the Bionnassay glacier

Night before the climb

Seracs on the Bionnassay

 

My high point below the Grand Couloir

"Feeling better" selfie

Climbing days later in Chamonix

 NOTES:

1. For more on Chamonix and the Mont Blanc and an audio post during the attempt:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamonix

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc

    http://alpineascentsmontblanc.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/audio-post-2014-07-01-14-11-05.mp3

2. There can be rockfalls and avalanches on the mountain. Here is a Youtube video example:
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gROp65zZXsI