I headed to Courmayeur with my regular, Verbier based mountain guide, Bertrand Martinet. I had told Bertrand that I needed to be challenged and tested and so he had planned three days of “serious mountaineering.” However, we needed to acclimatise first and so he chose the iconic Dent de Geant as our “warm-up”.
We left Sembranche at 4:30am and after various roadwork induced delays found ourselves setting out to climb the Giant’s Tooth as the morning sun lit up the mountains.
My last trip was with Andrew Noble and with me as the leader. When I am leading I feel like a bumbling amateur and we are usually twice as slow as the guidebooks suggest as we muddle our way up and down our target peak. When I am with Bertrand I feel like a seasoned pro, he is so fast and efficient and as I am currently trail race fit, we fly up mountains.
Today was no exception – we literally jogged across the glacier and stormed up the relatively easy approach until we arrived at the foot of the tooth. The tooth itself is almost straight up but with fixed ropes all the way – its physical but not technically demanding. I tried to use the fixed ropes as little as possible to improve my climbing for tomorrow. We came past a number of other parties who got a little upset when we asked to pass.
We reached the summit quickly and shot a series of photos as the sun pierced the swirling clouds making for some fairly atmospheric shots. We could have stayed a good while it was so warm, but we had a big day planned for tomorrow and so wanted to get back to the hut to relax.
A series of abseils took us back to the base and fortunately we were not bothered by crazy Spaniards and falling rocks. Once back on the glacier I decided to put my foot down and get a workout on the route back up to the hut. I was amused to discover that there is a Strava Segment on the return route and that we were only a few seconds off claiming a KOM (King of the Mountains).
We completed the entire trip in just over five hours which was pretty fast. We beat comfortably most of the other parties back to the hut and discovered they had left the hut at 4:00am, not much earlier than the time we left home – a good two and half hours away.
We ate well and headed for an early night as tomorrow we would start at 2:00am for “my test”.
Expeditions 