Tuesday, August 21
The story part III. The giant
Now of course it was NOT my desire to spend the following perfect days hauling equipment from base camp to Zermatt and then traveling to Chamonix, France. In Zermatt I went to the guides' office and ask if Matterhorn is climbable. As you can see from the photo it is almost completely white, which apparently means that it's not climbable, especially by novice mountaineer intermediate climber like myself (seems the problem is not getting up, even if there are around 1200 m of climbing, but getting down, because you cannot find the rappel points in the snow). This left me in tears outside the office, but let's not talk about this now ... [Did you know that Dufourspitze costs 400 euros to climb with a guide!? Not including a preparation climb which you have to do before, which is around 200 euros ... Matterhorn is around 1000 euros to climb!!]
Thus we decided that Mont Blanc (4808m, the highest in the Alps) will be doable - it being covered in snow is no biggie, unless there's avalanche risk - so we had to leave for Chamonix. Proposed route: again, start from 2300 m, go higher than the Gouter refuge (3800m), camp there and then in the same night attempt the peak. The slope is much much more steep and our backpacks were nearly as heavy because our stove was misbehaving so we had to carry water to save some time on the cooking (we had to melt snow otherwise). Plus at one point you have to cross a slope from one rocky point to another and there are rocks that fall from above, which means that you literally have to run for it and you are wearing crampons and your heavy backpack. Then it's just climbing, sometimes using ice axe but always with crampons (even though you are rock climbing).
We arrived in the camp around three. M. started building a wall to protect the tent from the fierce wind, and I started cooking! Yey!! It took me about one hour, one hour and a half to get the water boiling, and then M. around two hours to make the tea for the night ascent. Which means that, instead of eating two times (once to replenish our lost energy on that horrendous climb and once for the climb ahead) we only ate once.
We woke up around one thirty am, had some tea and some horrible cookie (too sweet) and manage to leave the tent around two. We were so drained of energy that the first slope up the Dome du gouter (4302m - we climbed it on the descent from Mont Blanc) got that horrible cookie flowing upstream, which made me really dizzy. When I saw two spanish climbers turning back though, and thought at what they must be feeling I decided that I didn't want to feel like that and moved on! Yey!!
There were a lot of people ahead of us, but because of the wind they decided to wait in the Valois refuge (4400m i think), which got us around the first ten on the summit around six o'clock!! There were some nice steep and sharp ridges to climb but after the dufourspitze one, they seemed so easy...
We spent around twenty minutes on the summit (the wind was very fierce) and then around nine we were back in the tent. We fell asleep as we were, I was wearing my harness, my sunglasses, gore-tex suit, everything except rope and boots :) We woke up around twelve and by five we were down at the train station at 2300m waiting for the train for Houches, then into a supermarket for some cheese and bread [mmmmm] then to the camping site and then to sleep!!! Whoa!!
The next day we went to visit Chamonix. I liked it much much better than Zermatt. Maybe it's the latin feeling or something ... but I just loved it. And all the equipment stores!!! Omg ... there were in Zermatt also but very expensive ... here they were quite reasonable ... mmmm ... Didn't buy anything, except some tshirts and a pair of merrell shoes that were on sale and unfortunately too small for me in the end ... alas ...
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