Fil à Plomb and Supercouloir, Shoelace Express Variant

At the time the picture above was taken, everything was going well. We'd made it in good time to our intended bivvy spot (the Refuge du Plan de l'Aiguille winter room), everyone was warm, happy and food that didn't originate in a can was abundant. The hut was surprisingly quiet for a high pressure window with decent looking conditions, just one other team of Frenchies rocking up during the Milka and Emmental course of our evening meal. I really value a good night's sleep, and always feel a bit of anxiety as a hut starts to fill up in the evening. Will we have to sardine ourselves together? Will someone steal my blanket? Will the mass of bodies make the room oppressively warm? Thankfully, even whilst awake, Ali manages to give off the air of a savage snorer. One appraising glance was all it took for this other team to choose to brave the elements and bivvy outside, instead of risk Guantanamo style sleep deprivation techniques.

So after a decent kip we started through the boulders towards Fil à Plomb, our alfresco friends trending towards Beyond. After about an hour of uphill physicality, we stopped to put on gloves and a rope at the beginning of the glacier. Our first speed bump of the enchainment looms. Ali is one of my best friends, and my main climbing partner. I add this preface so slagging him off seems more acceptable. Through life, he treads a fine line between carefree and being a total halfwit. As in his lack of planning and general disorganisation create issues, but he's skilful and resilient enough to muddle through. His halfwittedness manifested itself on this occasion by at this point realising he'd left two thirds of his three pairs of gloves in the hut. Leaving him with a singular pair of gloves for many days and multiple routes. The normal circular conversations about what we could do ensued, but ultimately it was decided that the extra cardio to retrieve them might doom us, so we pressed on. Thank God the Alps is drier than Scotland.

The first half of Fil à Plomb is easier and went fairly smoothly. Smoothly enough that I don't really remember too much about it. We moved together up the moderate ground, with the odd move feeling slightly more precarious in the early season conditions. The crux of the route revolves around two steeper ice pitches, right in the middle of the 700m route. Unfortunately I do have a slightly clearer memory of these. I took the first of these pitches, traversing left from a stance under an overhang, aiming for the wide streak of ice that would lead up to the next belay. I moved left, axes in a sliver of snow-ice, front points finding edges and dimples on bare granite. My naive dreams of drilling in screws left, right and centre disappearing with the sound of my axes tinkling against rock, barely slowed by the thin ice smear. After making a series of strange and unnecessary moves, I could finally start going straight up, where the ice began turning from a sort of crystallised Sorbet, through Gelato and finally to something approaching decent ice.

Ali took us up another steepening, before a slog up exit snowfields found us on the ridge leading towards the Midi. A brief bit of down, and a final depressing up led to the stunted little sister of the Cosmiques Refuge, the Abri Simond hut. Small, slightly scuzzy and unguarded, I suspect my sleep related hut anxiety would have been off the charts, if it wasn't for the fact the entire Vallée Blanche was deserted. Both the Midi and Skyway were shut for the month for annual maintenance, and no one else had thought of our cunning north face of the Midi approach! Or perhaps they had thought harder about it than we had, but more on that foreshadowing later. Either way, we had found a rare slice of solitude pie in the Mont Blanc Massif. The team then had some slightly difficult decisions to make. Fil à Plomb had taken slightly more out of us than we had expected, both from a lack of fitness and lack of acclimatisation. The idea of getting up halfway through the night to do something longer, harder and higher seemed gallant but a bit intense. We instead plumped for the idea of having a rest day at the Abri Simond, before having a look at Supercouloir the day after.

A brilliant plan that would inevitably mean running out of our tightly rationed food and gas, but might maximise our chances of doing something cool. I hate running low on gas, I think I identify as quite a thirsty person. Ali seems to be quite camel like and often finishes days with his bottle half full, whereas I seem to shrivel up quite quickly, like a high maintenance house plant. You use loads of gas on missions above the freezing level, as all drinking water has to be melted from snow. Instead of constantly doing little trips to top up the stove, we bought in bulk and brought a bin bag full at a time. A decent strategy we thought, except that a mouse kept leaving us little presents in the form of droppings, nestled amoungst our precious drinking snow!

Feeling pretty well rested, we started towards Supercouloir the next morning, in the continuing stunning weather. One major benefit of routes like this, is that route finding is never an issue, since they exclusively involve going straight up. So after a cheeky bit of phone navigation to find the right approach snow slope, we stuck to our game plan and started going straight up. Ali smashed out the first crux pitch, looking slightly flustered at one point, but calming his nerves by placing the karabiner worth of hexes he'd inexplicably decided to pack. They weren't clipped to the rope, and weren't actually attached to the rock either, instead just perched on a ledge, but at least they weren't on his harness anymore. I did the next pitch up and over the snow plug, before good quality ice led to the end of the bolted pitches. The terrain eases after this and at sunset we were on top of Mont Blanc du Tacul. Reversing the Tacul normal route, back to our basecamp shack, was surprisingly adventurous. Since there wasn't a track in, we had spent the afternoon before staring up at the face, trying to memorise a way through the giant seracs. But only able to see a headtorch beam worth of the face in front of us, the day before's schematic didn't seem to match up very well with the giant drops that kept barring our way. Tired, and a little bit over it, this was suboptimal. But thankfully we were now hardened, or perhaps numbed, to these dangers. So after a bit of backtracking and aimless wandering we found ourselves back on flatter terrain, heading towards the hut.

A glaring omission in our planning was how we were going to get back down to Chamonix, marooned as we currently were up on the Col du Midi. During the other 11 months of the year, we would have been able to ride the cable car back down. In winter we could have skied the Vallée Blanche, or a steeper line like Rond or Cosmiques. But in dry and unknown condition, we were worried about unsurpassable crevasse fields. With food and water almost depleted, we thought we might only have the supplies and energy for one attempted descent route before things took a turn for the serious. Retreat down one of the climbing lines on the north face of the Midi was a possibility, but unattractive because it had the potential to be both involved and gear intensive. We had discussed continuing on from the top of the Tacul, up Trois Monts to Mont Blanc and then down to Les Houches, but beans and psych had been low on the summit of the Tacul the night before. Since we didn't have paragliders, and I also don't have the ability to paraglide, it was decided that walking to Skyway and descending to Italy was the safest option. The only added wrinkle was that the aforementioned maintenance extended to the Mont Blanc tunnel, so whilst descending to Italy would bear fruit in the form of pizza, it would also necessitate a mammoth hitch back via the St Bernard Pass.

Walking across the Glacier du Géant we heard a strange and unexpected sound, human voices! Once we'd confirmed this wasn't some sort of auditory mirage, and was in fact people working up on Panoramic, our spirits started to lift. Surely these workers weren't expected to commute the 2000 vertical metres on foot to work, the gondola must be running! Staggering into the lift station, we saw there were, as suspected, various Italians dotted around the place. Despite neither of us being able to leverage rugged good looks or sex appeal, I felt optimistic that a rapid descent to Courmayeur was in our near future. However, even after repeatedly explaining that we understood the lift was closed, but we were pretty pooped, and surely we could hop in to one of the frequent lifts shuttling workers up and down, we were met with the same answer; "Eet's close-ed!" Deflated with our 20 minute descent turning into a many hour, cartilage reducing affair, we turned tail and abbed off a balcony with as much sass as we could muster. We did try our luck on the way past the mid station, but in the end our trip was powered purely by human means.