When you do the course with Mt Blanc Guides, all the nights that you're in Chamonix are spent in their accommodation in town which was surprisingly nice. Mai and I scored the studio apartment above the garage which was really spacious. After getting settled in we went upstairs in the main building for our first team meeting to discuss the week ahead with the Guides and our team.
John the owner of Mt Blanc Guides is a really great guy, very personable and has lots of funny/scary mountain stories to tell. Our two other guides for the week were Dave and Fabio who were also very knowledgeable and passionate about the mountains. All of them had LOTS of climbing stories and seemed to be pretty proficient which was comforting to know seeing as the basis of my mountaineering knowledge is having watched nearly every episode of Man Vs Wild with Bear Grylls (impressive I know). We were lucky to have a small team, just six of us, containing two friends Cindy and Lynn from US and UK and Vit and Katrina a couple from Slovakia all of whom were super nice people, a little older than us but also quite a bit fitter too!
The next day we all set out around Chamonix for a last minute gear and snack shopping session before getting into the minibus to head to Italy. We stopped on the way to our destination in a pretty weird little restaurant that's decc'd out with goblin and fairy paintings and statues which I'm assuming was just part of local culture, where the food was good and the coffee amazing. Then it was onto the Gran Paradiso to start our acclimatisation mission.
Now climbing the Gran Paradiso is a very important part of your acclimatisation for Mt Blanc, but make no mistake, it's also a test. If you're not fit enough to get up the Gran Paradiso, guess what, you're not even going to Mt Blanc let alone attempting to climb it. So after hiking up to and staying the night in the absolutely awesome family run Refugio Federico Chabod, I think we were all a bit anxious to get going the following morning to see if all our training had paid off.
We started out pretty early and after an hour or so of hiking you make it to the glacier where you put on your crampons and rope up. It wasn't our first time walking on a glacier, but probably was the first time walking on one where there was a real danger of falling in a crevasse. The Guides talked us through some techniques to moving in a group over glaciers and was good to be learning some new skills.
We zig zagged up the glacier for what seemed like quite a while until it finally flattened out onto the mountain at the foot of the steeper rocky section before the summit. We did a bit of scrambling up the rocks where a queue was starting to form (such is life on one of the easier 4000m peaks in the European alps). After not too much time we were at the only technical part of the climb which was a bit of a scramble traverse over quite an exposed drop. You get roped in so really wasn't that bad and also there was so much cloud cover it was hard to see the drop so that probably helped too.
After the rock traverse we were at the summit and I found myself a bit surprised by how quickly we'd got there. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of walking but wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Of course as they say, the summit is only half way, so after a couple of celebratory photos it was time to start making our way down. The way down was WAY quicker than the climb and we were back in the refugio drinking beers within a couple of hours.
All in all Gran Paradiso was a pretty great couple of days, definitely our first 4000m peak and a good confidence builder that we were properly acclimatised and fit enough (just!) to have a crack at Mt Blanc!
