TMB Day 2: The Tour du Mont Blanc IS DIFFICULT!
Les Contamines > Refuge Bonhomme
I laid in bed for a while thinking about how I’d gotten myself into this mess and trying to come up with ways I might be able to get myself out of it. I could fake a sprain. I could fake Covid test. I could just sneak out while the girls were still asleep and disappear. Honestly, I was just stalling while I tried to steal one last peek at our Frenchmen’s bikini underwear. Voyeur is a French word after all. Just trying to fit in.
I went to the common room where I’d hung my socks to air out. The air was not at all pleased with this arrangement. It had only been a day and my socks had already combined pristine distilled sweat and award-winning stink molecules into some new compound that would surely rival penicillin in its healing properties and that had already surpassed pond water wet dog in the stink department and was swiftly gaining on angry homeless skunk status by the second.
We had some breakfast and coffee and traded stories about how little sleep we got. I have severe anxiety about bothering other people. My main goal in life is to melt into the background and have no one notice me at all. We are self-employed and my official title in our businesses is “Director of Behind the Scenes Operations” and that’s exactly what I want to be. I want to instigate and direct and pull the strings - but without anyone knowing I’m doing so. (Speaking of pulling the strings, I was an honest to god marionette operator for a year or two. Like - that was my job. Seriously.) I’ve been known to snore. I didn’t believe this until my wife had me try a snoring app that records you as you sleep and gives you some sort of score. My score was not good and I could only listen to a few seconds of the recording which sounded like a gorilla trying to sing Motörhead’s The Ace of Spades while also drinking a bucket of Godzilla’s mucus. I hope that conveys the unpleasantness of what I heard. I’m not at all implying that Motörhead is unpleasant. But mix that with a gorilla and giant reptile mucus and… All this to say, sleeping in a dormitory setting has caused me all sorts of worry. Luckily for me, Godzilla himself (herself?) was sleeping in the room next door. And this person’s snoring made a noise like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Much much worse than anything I could hope to produce. After hours I remembered that we’d brought earplugs. Mine worked well, but the girls had an impossible time sleeping.
For that reason, coffee was important so we enjoyed some at breakfast and then got our packs together. We started out on some lovely flat roads for about a mile. This is what the TMB refers to as its “lulling” stage. Then we started the uphill. It was steep and endless, but I remember saying, “This isn’t that bad.” I remember saying that.
After a 1,700-foot climb, we arrived at Refuge de la Balme at 10 am, much earlier than we’d expected. This was the halfway point so we figured it was going to be a very early day. We skipped food and just had some coffee.
Then we started climbing. Those buildings in the photo below are where we’d taken a break.
Somewhere along the side of this trail, Jennifer compared hiking the TMB to having a multitude of babies over and over again. The uphills are labor and birth, the flat parts are holding the baby and cooing at it, the downhills are watching it grow up - and then you just repeat that over and over again. I’ve never given birth, but if this is what it’s like - I’m out. Then we hit our first section of snow. If only it would be the last.
The climb up to Col du Bonhomme was ruthless. Our break between insanely steep sections consisted of wildly steep sections that were no break at all. We stopped for a rest at the top and realized that we’d made a mistake by not eating. We looked ahead and the trail skirted through the snow across a mountainside with an extremely steep drop to the right. I looked at the SOS button on my Garmin InReach and wondered how long it would take for a helicopter to pick us up. I thought better of it, but just barely.
There’s no way that the photos or any words can describe the views we were privy to along the way. I’ve made this comparison. It’s like you’re in a video game where as you go through you lose health. But there are ways to boost your health along the way. Filling your eyeballs with the sorts of vistas we experienced walking from Col du Bonhomme to the Refuge Bonhomme raised our health to 100%. Of course, the brutal slog got us back to 50%, but - it was a decent trade. Upon arriving at the hut, we got a snack of soup and bread, and I believe there was a beer or two involved.
The refuge was incredibly remote and was powered by solar. They get one or two helicopter drops of supplies during the season and they have someone make a trip to civilization with a mule every day or two to pick up fresh vegetables. I learned that ‘refuge worker’ is code for ‘cool ass human.’. You just have to be a certain type of person to live and work in such a remote place. And I very much like this type of person. We continued our ongoing game of cards, enjoyed the views, had a great dinner with some nice people, and went to bed early to await the coming fire alarms.
We knew what to expect today. 4,000 feet of elevation. 500 more than any of us have ever done in one go. We were shattered. But it was an incredible day.
Good stuff
Great story, Ang. You could have avoided all this by joining the French Foreign Legion. Heading to the next story. Cheers. Love the photos.