A New Playground

(French/Swiss/Italian Alps)

Chamonix - Montenvers - Petit Charmoz - Requin
(green line shows where we went)

Came a time when our Leader, Joe McCash, judged us fit to knock off a big Alp or two, since we had bagged a few wee Tyrol Alps without difficulty or harrowment the previous summer, and he unveiled his Plan: start in Chamonix, thence into Switzerland, toddle over into Italy and back again to Chamonix, sewing up a number of Aiguilles of varying difficulty (“granite and sunshine”). All of which sounded both alluring and cheap.

There would be four of us: Joe, Allen, Mac, and me. We’d take our own sleeping-bags, stay mostly in mountain huts, carry our food (too expensive in huts), use a primus for cooking; it would be sunny all the time. Languages? “I’ll do French,” volunteered Joe confidently, “Mac can do Swiss, and you [that was me] better do Italian. Allen can do the currency conversion and expense sharing.” Ho, hum, I’d better put in some effort at All you Need to Know in Italy.

And so, train south, ferry across to Calais, train to Paris, an evening soaking up the culture (omelette, dodgems, hugely entertaining toilets), then onwards to the south. The entertainment in the toilets was not so much that they were merely a hole in the floor bracketed by two raised foot-sized stances, but that they flushed automatically every x minutes, and when the ceiling-height cistern flushed and the water rose above the stances you had to be prepared to climb up the tall cistern pipe in mid-evacuation, or else be swamped. “Good practice,” said Joe. Practice for what? Best not knowing.

In Chamonix, Joe (French) did the shopping: a dozen baguettes. Why? We already had our staple diet: dry pasta and pemmican, lightweight and unappetising, plus Nescafe and as many bars of chocolate as we could carry.

(In my geekish way, I am now going to add heights in feet, as an aid to Really Old people like myself, who don’t have a feel for the metres which you less old people can read off the maps.)

verticality

From Chamonix, 3402ft, we toiled up beside the railway (too expensive to ride in) under our unaccustomed loads, to Montenvers, 6280ft, where Joe found us an outhouse to doss in. Here was our first view of the Dru, as the clouds lifted and revealed it across the Mer de Glace (the local glacier) spectacularly vertical. The head, used to the angle it needs for looking at the top of the Buachaille from the road, suddenly finds it has to tilt up, up past the belt of cloud, and up yet more, to see the Dru summit, twice the height of anything we were used to in the homeland.

view from Petit Charmoz

(Geek note: much later I found that the Buachaille from road, an altitude of 2425 ft, 1.28 miles away, involves an upward tilt of 24.7°, while the Dru from Montenvers, 6036 ft over 1.86 miles, needs 49°)

The next day, Allen and I sewed up the Petit Charmoz, while Joe and Mac knocked off the Grand ditto, and that evening we toddled up the Mer de Glace to the Requin Hut, at 8255ft, marvelling, as we hauled ourselves up the last scramble from the glacier, at the carrying capacity of porters who took crates of provisions up to the huts in training to become guides. No wonder food in huts cost a lot.

toddling up the Mer de Glace

the Requin hut

Our next objective was the Dent du Requin  (“Tooth of the man-eater, or white shark . . . so called on account of its causing requiems to be sung” – gulp). The Shark being 11217ft high, this was going to be a Munro-sized day, surely easy-peasy? Well, aside from having to start at 4 a.m. to avoid all the avalanches and stone-falls that would clobber us if we weren’t back down before the sunshine heated the snow.

Once on the move and shedding sleepiness, it was beautiful, lovely firm holds everywhere in the red granite, cloudless sky, glacier shimmering far far down below, altitude beginning to bite a bit but, so far, not enough to destroy the enjoyment.

Except that we got lost.

Lost! How could this be?

lost: which is the Requin?

Back in the homeland, any much-used climb was clear to see, because of the nail-marks on the rock, for this was a time before vibram soles had come into use. But among the Chamonix Aiguilles, the Playground of Europe, vibrams had been used since the mid-thirties, hence no nail-marks on the rock. Suddenly we realised we’d have to read the climber’s guide written in a foreign language! if we hoped to find where the route should go. Poised on those lovely red granite holds, we wrestled with technical terms in Frogspeak, and finally realised we were way off course.

Abashed, but comforted by a bite of chocolate, we wove to and fro, hither and yon, without ever finding the proper route, and time passed with frightening speed: long ago we should have been back at the hut, now the avalanches and stone-falls were going to get us, the white shark was about to eat us, we could hear its teeth snapping.

So, reluctantly, we embraced the unfamiliar spectre of Failure, and started the descent. Down is always harder than Up; Down when you’ve wandered off course is harder still; Down when you’re hungry and getting tired and can hear the shark’s jaws snapping and it’s late is yet harder.

Abseiling in those days was simply a matter of finding a suitable bit of rock to put a sling around, threading the rope through it and wrapping the rope about your body in such a way that you could control the speed of descent with your arms. That was fine, we’d practised it back home on the Cobbler. Not so fine, though, was abseiling into the darkness where there was no way to know if there would be anything to stand on at the end of the rope or if you’d just shoot off into space; and least fine of all was the last abseil where the only thing to loop a sling around was a loose boulder which inched its way ever closer to the edge as each body jerked its way downwards. After which the last little glacier, while unduly soft and possibly hiding crevasses, seemed a doddle, and was extraordinarily beautiful in the moonlight.

Our easy-peasy climb had taken eighteen hours, and we had shared a 2-oz bar of chocolate between four of us. Need for sleep trumped the growling stomach, and we groped through the dark for the dormitory, where we found our sleeping-bags . . . occupied by dormant bodies which muttered “Ah, M’sieu, Madame, we ‘ave thought you dead.”

[Note: the photographs are my own, taken during the events described. Google has heaps of far better pictures of the places mentioned.]