Contemplating the summit.

Sherridan and I are not exactly the peak bagging types who have to scale the top of every mountain we see. Quite the contrary, in fact. Sure, we get a kick out of sitting on a mountain top and enjoying the view, but we get just as big a kick out of avoiding the climb in the first place.

That said, we've begun considering climbing to the summit of Mont Blanc while we're there. It's the tallest mountain in the Alps, after all, and you can bet your last dollar the kids will ask "Did you climb to the top?" when we get home (I remember only too well Sarah telling all her friends at school about me "climbing" Mt Everest when we went to Basecamp a year ago).

If we are to make the climb then we don't want it to be more arduous than necessary so I've searched for the easiest (or is that "least difficult") route to the top and I think I've settled on the route from Auguille du Midi because the first 2,800 metres of the climb is done in a cable car :-)

Leaving Chamonix we travel to the peak of Auguille du Midi which takes us from around 950 metres above sea level to more than 3,800 metres. Our experience planning for the Nepal trek taught us all we needed to know about the dangers of altitude sickness and how to avoid it but I've forgotten much of the detail so I'd better go back to my old notes. I'm pretty sure we'd be very close to exceeding the recommended daily altitude gain so I need to get my head around that.

We'll probably spend the night at Refuge des Cosmiques which is a small hut near the Auguille reserved specifically for summit climbers before a pre-dawn start the next morning. From what I can see it doesn't look like a very difficult or dangerous climb but apparently 100 people die every year on the massif - hopefully all doing something far more dangerous than climbing to the top. Apparently some 20,000 climbers manage to negotiate their way to the summit each year without dying so the odds are stacked somewhat in our favour :-)

Mont Blanc summit from Auguille du Midi