How to Climb Mt Blanc 🇫🇷
Imagine you show up in Chamonix, France with no gear and a desire to climb the highest peak in Europe. You have the skills from previous glacier climbs like Mt Hood and Mt. Baker but you don’t have your alpine climbing gear. That’s where we found ourselves at the start of September 2024. In three weeks we managed to buy/rent all the gear, setup accommodations in the mountain huts and summit on September 22nd without a guide. This blog post walks you through the route, planning, what to buy and what to rent.
Description
Mt Blanc is the highest peak in the Alps, at 4,810 meters (15,780 feet) above sea level. It is located on the border of France and Italy, with the highest point being in the Aiguille du Midi massif in France.
It’s a fairly straightforward climb but has a few challenges including some mixed climbing (snow and rock) rockfall on the Grand Couloir, crevasse risk and high altitude risk.
To mitigate risk we did the following:
- For weather we used Mountain Forecast Mt. Blanc and opted for a good weather forecast, which we didn’t really get, more on that later.
- We planned to ascend the Grand Couloir in the middle of the night and come down before 1pm. This avoids most of the rock fall, which peaks between 5-6pm. We wore crampons during the entire portion which helped a lot with the mixed rock and snow.
- We roped up during the crevasse portion and each had a crevasse rescue kit similar to the Petzel Rad system that we could use for creating a pulley and self-rescue. Crevasse risk was much higher than others had reported probably due to the late season and both Alex and Will partially fell through a snow bridge into a crevasse.
- Altitude was the biggest unknown, we had been in Chamonix at ~5,000' for the previous three weeks so we figured this would help us acclimatize but this proved to be the biggest obstacle. Towards the summit Alex’s lips turned blue.
Route
We did the Goûter route which is the standard route, starting from the Nid d’Aigle train station and stopping at Tête Rousse hut for the night. From there we woke up at 1am and were on the trail by 2am in order to get to summit at 9am
- Day one we took the train to Nid d’Aigle which is impressively steep. It’s hard to see in the below photo but you have to lean forward to stand straight up. From there we hiked to Tête Rousse hut which took about 2 hours and was a relatively easy trail.
- Tête Rousse inside was really nice, they have a dining area where you eat dinner. Our dinner was a three course meal with soup, salmon lasagna, salad and cheesecake for dessert. It’s pretty incredible what they have up there considering all the supplies are delivered via helicopter.
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Now onto the climbing! We decided to depart Tête Rousse at 2am which turned out to be just about right. We made the summit just before 9am. The first part of the climb is scaling the Grand Couloir which is a large face of loose rock that you climb up. There’s lots of rockfall in the lower part but as you get higher you’re on an exposed arete so the risk of rockfall is substantially diminished. Overall this part was pretty straightforward but definitely much easier at night when you can only see a few feet in front of you.
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After you climb the Grand Couloir you end up at the old Goûter hut. I recommend stopping here to put on your rope as the rest of the route you’re exposed to crevasse risk.
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From the old Goûter hut you hike along a knife edge ridge, at the end of the ridge you start ascending a face. This face continues up to the Vallot hut, which is located at 14,311 feet (4,362 meters). We stopped at VAllot to warm up and get some food ,in us. Alex took a short nap and in retrospect this was where she showed the first signs of altitude sickness. Her breathing was extremely deep and raspy and she started slurring her words.
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After the Vallot hut you continue up over another ridge and ascend about 1,000 feet to the summit. The summit is very unremarkable. When we reached it, it was a complete whiteout so we couldn’t see where to stop. The summit was so unremarkable we passed over the summit initially and started down on the other side before realizing our mistake.
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We raced down, not stopping at Vallot but continuing all the way to old Goûter before stopping. We were intent on making the 4:10 train and not spending another night. We down climbed the Grand Couloir - pro-tip we saw folks with a via ferrata setup for down climbing this section which would be useful since there’s lots of metal rails to clip into.
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We got back down to Tête Rousse at around 1:15pm and spend about 45 minutes there before departing to the train station.
Gear
To climb Mt Blanc, you will need the following gear:
- 🥾 Mountaineering boots
- 🔩 Crampons (must be steel as there’s a fair amount of mixed climbing up to the Grand Couloir)
- ⛏️ Ice axe
- 🧗♀️ Climbing harness
- ⛑️ Helmet
- 🧵 Rope for glacier travel, we used a 30m half-rope from Beal
- 🆘 Crevasse rescue gear, we used the Petzel “rad-esque” system which consists of:
- 🔧 Petzel micro traction
- 🔩 Petzel tiblock
- 🔗 2 x locking caribeaners
- 🎗️ 2 x alpine slings, 90cm and 120cm
- 🧥 Hardshell jacket and pantsx
- 👖 Softshell pants
- 👕 base layer
- 🧥 Puffy
- 🧤 Mittens
- 🕶️ Glacier glasses (Cat 4)
- 🔦 Headlamp
- 🎒 Backpack
- 💦 Thermos
- 🍔 Food for climbing
Shopping for Gear
So right off the bat we realized we could rent the ice axe, crampons, backpack and boots from Ravanel which saved us a ton of money. The rest of the gear we initially thought we needed to purchase (which turned out to be untrue, you can rent almost anything from Chamonix Pro Shop). We also discovered what the cheapest gear store (Decathalon) and the most expensive (Snell) in Chamonix.
If we were to do it again we’d visit the following stores (in order of cheapest to most expensive):
- Decathalon - bought rope and glacier gear
- Technica Extreme - bought food and gloves
- Intersport - bought
- Ravanel
- Snell - bought Petzel stuff and a rope I thought I could return and couldn’t (whoops)
I hope you enjoyed this writeup, please leave a comment if you have any questions.