Quotes of the Day

Most of the 11,000 or so people who attempt to climb Mont Blanc each summer by the Goûter Ridge Route try to catch a ride on the first cable car of the morning from Les Houches to Bellevue. This is prudent: it's still a long climb from the mountain station to the overnight refuge of Goûter, where places are limited. And you want to get across the Grand Couloir before the big rocks start barreling down late in the day, after the sun has loosened the snow's grip on them. But Christophe Profit, the guide I've secured for my ascent of Western Europe's highest peak, will have none of it. We get to Les Houches after the crowd has gone. We have one coffee at the bottom of the lift and another at the top. Only then, with calm deliberation and a modicum of caffeine, do we start on the day's 2,000-m vertical climb which will set us up, before dawn the next morning, for our quest to reach the summit.

Profit, 43, is not one for convention. One of France's greatest living mountaineers, he unwittingly embodies what he calls "le style anglais": the mix of adventurousness, confidence and will that some Englishmen brought to the Chamonix Valley in the 19th century, much as others did to the exploration of Africa or the Polar regions. In the village of Chamonix, their spirit joined up with the skill and knowledge of local guides, and the sport of mountaineering, or more precisely alpinisme, was born.

Mont Blanc, whose 4,808-m arching, snow-covered summit sets the mood every day in Chamonix, is not an especially difficult climb, yet it's the highest Alp. That combination makes it a favorite mountain for novices, many of whom ought not to try it. Some succeed more by dumb luck than skill; some are injured; a few die. I too am a novice — I had hiked up 4,418-m Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevadas, but Mont Blanc stands for far more than just another 400 m in altitude; in technique and tradition, it represents a whole different level, one I'd long wanted to test. So I spent a week learn- ing the basics of walking on crampons, setting an ice ax, and adjusting to altitude above the magic number of 4,000 m, where stark beauty and inhospitality become indistinguishable.

For an hour and a half we hiked steadily along the tracks of the cogged railway that, once snow free, will carry climbers to Nid d'Aigle (Eagle's Nest). The traffic was light: a fit father and son from Calgary and, at the burned-out restaurant by the railroad's terminus, a group of five Poles, the oldest among them smoking dolefully. Instead of rushing up with them to eat with the 80 or so other guests at the Goûter refuge, Christophe veered off across a snowy plain to pay a visit to the new gardien of the Tête Rousse refuge, another of the climbers' huts that dot the Mont Blanc massif. There in midafternoon we enjoyed the most perfect omelettes imaginable, the eggs thickened with cream and chunks of potato and bacon. After that respite we headed back out for the most serious part of the day's journey: up and across the Grand Couloir. We traversed it as quickly as we could and were relieved to get our hands on the rocks of the steep arête that leads to the refuge itself.

When we arrived at Goûter in the early evening, dinner was over and most of the climbers were already abed: wake-up call for the march to the summit would come at 2 a.m. We got to eat with the staff in the kitchen: pork with prunes, noodles au gratin and wine. The talk centered on how impossible it has become to manage traffic on the mountain. Goûter is designed to sleep 100 people, 120 in a pinch. Yet on the right summer day as many as 400 people assault Mont Blanc, most on the easiest route via Goûter. This has led to wildcat bivouacs outside the hut and serious sanitation issues made obvious against the once-white snow.

Getting a place to stay is the only bureaucratic hassle facing would-be climbers. France is a highly regulated society, but climbing remains a strictly personal responsibility. If some idiot in tennis shoes and shorts comes puffing up the mountain, nobody can force him back. There is a price for this freedom. Every season the rescue squad intervenes more than 100 times, and the mountain claims at least a dozen lives.

The big gamble factor, of course, is the weather. Extreme cold and destabilizing gusts of 100 km/h are not uncommon. Storms materialize literally out of thin air in a matter of minutes. Insufficient acclimatization (at least three nights at 2,500 m are recommended), a poor night's sleep at the noisy refuge, a lost glove or a cracked lens in glacier glasses can be enough to transform success into failure or worse. For all that, Mont Blanc via the normal route has long been disdained by experienced climbers.

Local crystal hunter Jacques Balmat and local physician Michel-Gabriel Paccard completed the first ascent in 1786. They claimed the "substantial" reward offered by Geneva physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure that had languished unclaimed for more than 25 years. Then the dam broke: by 1808 Balmat got to the top with his 14-year-old son and a hearty local serving girl, Marie Paradis. After Waterloo, the English came in ever greater numbers, and by the second half of the century, in droves. One of the great British alpinists of the 19th century, Albert Mummery, said that climbing Mont Blanc was "an occupation that calls to mind the treadmill on which British convicts are made to work nonstop." His gifted compatriots were already looking for tougher challenges: Edward Whymper, the legendary lion of 19th century alpinists, failed seven times before he reached the summit of the Matterhorn in 1865, and four in his party died on the way down.

Mountaineering has a harder edge than most popular sports: if you miss a putt, you're not going to lose a toe to frostbite, let alone plummet screaming to your death. Yet suffering itself surely isn't the point, nor is risk. "You do it because you love the mountains," says Profit, whose exploits have included scrambles up the north faces of the Matterhorn, the Eiger and the Grandes Jorasses in 24 hours in 1988, and three years later a sublime two-man climb of Nepal's 8,611-m K2. "Risk is everywhere; the point is to minimize it."

Still, for most of us, mountaineering brings a peculiarly displaced pleasure: you suffer, mightily at times, in order to reach the summit or the refuge or the top of a slope; it is then, sweetened by the effort, that the payoff comes. Most of humanity would not subject itself to this: why strain and risk falling or frostbite when you can take a chairlift and get the same stunning views? But the views aren't the same, and the pleasure of having gotten there on your own steam is genuine — eventually.

We were up at 2 a.m. like everyone else, but Christophe again wasn't in a hurry. Another touch of "le style anglais," or simply a recognition that at my pace, we'd be getting passed by young enthusiasts all the way up? When everyone else was gone we put on our gear and started up the mountain. Far below to the northwest we could see the glow of Geneva; to the southeast a delicate string of headlamps zigzagged to daunting heights up the looming slope of the Dôme du Goûter. The prospect of dawn advanced slowly as we climbed, but not enough to warm the frigid air or calm the 50-km/h winds. The gusts became brutal across the tortured plain at the top of the Dôme, where I was knocked flat.

We still had about 300 m of climbing to do as we ascended the Bosses Ridge, with the sun slowly rising to tint everything first pink and then an otherworldly orange. A lone Austrian climber began to shadow us, showing every bit as much exhaustion as I did (which I shamefully found heartening). The slope seemed to rise forever, but now we could sense success. The final ridge rises gently, disappearing into a fine point in the early morning light. "It's a gift that the final ridge is like this," said Christophe. "People realize they're going to make it."

And so we made it. It must have been 8:30 a.m. (my watch, like the tube to my water bag, had long since frozen) — very late for the purists, many of whom had passed us going back down. There were shoulder claps and heartfelt congratulations among Christophe, the indefatigable photographer Pascal Tournaire and myself. I felt an immense relief — erroneous, as it turned out, since the climb down was murder — that from here on in there would be no more screaming lungs or apologetic requests to "faire une pause d'une petite seconde." The wind and cold were biting but the view was crystalline: all the way south to Italy's 4,061-m Gran Paradiso; to the north and east the Grandes Jorasses and the whole storied panorama of the French Alps, and in the distance the Matterhorn in Switzerland — a world without end of glaciers and mountains.

It was a moment of marvel rather than reflection, but wasn't being here at the summit the point of all this? Years ago a hiking partner had venomously called me "destination oriented" — definitely not cool in a world where the enlightened supposedly know that der Weg ist das Ziel (the way is the goal). Okay, I plead guilty. Call me a peak-bagger, a misguided apostle of achievement, whatever — I'd done what I set out to do. Later, after we'd traversed two other mountains and climbed a third and my knee had seized up in the cramped gondola on the last leg down, I realized there was more to it than that. I'd gone to my limit, and now it's higher than it was before. There's nothing like a mountain to make that happen.

• Stretching physical limits on Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Western Europe