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Outside Magazine December 2003
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The Hard Way
Fire and Ice (cont.)

THIS PAST SUMMER in Europe was the hottest in recorded history. New highs were set north to south, east to west. In England—where people are accustomed to wearing tweeds in July—the mercury shot above 100 degrees for the first time since people began measuring. In Switzerland, the temperature spiked in August to a Saharan 107 degrees. From the Netherlands south to Italy, at least 35,000 people, many of them elderly, perished from dehydration and heatstroke. France, which was hit the hardest, attributed some 15,000 deaths to the six-week heat wave.

In the Alps, several massive rock towers collapsed on the 14,691-foot Matterhorn in mid-July, stranding some 70 climbers and temporarily closing the mountain. In early August, a series of enormous rockslides swept down the usually climbable west face of 12,237-foot Le Petit Dru, knocking out a chunk of the legendary Bonatti Pillar. By mid-August, the three customarily safe snow marches up the Mont Blanc massif had become death traps: the Grands Mulets route threatened by collapsing ice cliffs, the Traverse route menaced by a labyrinth of yawning crevasses, and the Goûter route plagued by rockfall. After two hikers were killed by falling rock below the Goûter route in mid-August, alpine guides stopped taking any bookings for Mont Blanc, effectively shutting down the peak for the first time in its 217-year climbing history. In 1760, Professor Horace-Bénédict de Saussure of Geneva offered a reward of 20 gold talers for the first ascent of Mont Blanc. The prospect of climbing this behemoth of groaning glaciers was so intimidating that no one took him up on the offer for 15 years. It would require ten more years and ten attempts before Frenchmen Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat reached the summit, on August 8, 1786. They had neither crampons nor rope, and they bivouacked in the snow, wrapped in wool blankets.

The first woman to summit Mont Blanc was Marie Paradis, from Chamonix, in 1808. The world's first recorded climbing catastrophe occurred on the mountain in 1820, when an avalanche swept five guides into a crevasse, killing three. Ascents of all the satellite summits—Grandes Jorasses, Les Droites, Petit Dru, Aiguille de Grepon—were accomplished before the turn of the 20th century; the innumerable difficult routes were put up on these same spires during the last century.

Today, the vast, intricately incised Mont Blanc massif remains an icon of mountaineering.

As long as there's snow.


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