On the Tour du Mont Blanc
Part 2
What is it that draws us to the long, hard hikes? Some of it is testing yourself against the difficulty. Some of it is knowing that, the deeper in you go, the more the wildness envelops you, the more dramatic the beauty, the greater the chance of encountering a fox, a bear, a marmot, an eagle. The farther from everything ordinary.
Powerful as Kilimanjaro was, Africa’s most remarkable hike for me was in the Ruwenzori mountains, along the border between Congo (where I was living) and Uganda. European explorers associated this range with Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon, because water runs from its slopes to the Nile. The Ruwenzoris are as mysterious as they sound, with mosses of every hue carpeting the ground and creeping up the trees, and towering plants that Dr. Seuss might have imagined. Our guides brought along a goat to roast for our Christmas dinner, later exchanging it for a piglet in a little village we walked through. (I appreciated the piglet’s slower pace for the rest of that long day.) In the third and highest hut was a guestbook in Flemish (from the days of Belgium’s colonialization), which Lowell Thomas had signed. The 10-mile massif, craggy, snowy, glaciated, towered above.
On our recent hike along New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, a most unlikely fact emerged: Of our group of 31, three of us had hiked in that fabled range, deep in equatorial Africa.
As the long days on the gorgeous Routeburn loosened the knots in my mind, I thought of other multi-day treks I’ve taken: The Jotunheimen of Norway, where a stream was so swollen that I have nightmares still of the terror I felt before throwing myself over it. The wild and rugged Pyrenees, and the two bird species we saw that are found only there. The Cotswolds, with their sheep pastures and their steeples beckoning from each storybook village. Machu Picchu, where our sure-footed guides carried everything from the portable toilets to our tents and woke us each morning with coca-leaf tea. The blazing-hot hike down into the Grand Canyon from the North Rim with my older daughter, when the water source we’d been told about didn’t show up. The Grand Traverse des Alpes across Switzerland, alpenglow out the window of each lovely inn.
But the granddaddy of them all was the Tour du Mont Blanc.
The idea of our trekking around Mont Blanc originated on a Blue Ridge hike with our younger daughter. (Another gift of hiking: You may find your teenager talking to you.) As we descended from the parkway past one lovely waterfall after another, I mentioned an article I’d seen in an in-flight magazine about a hike around the Mont Blanc summit. “I want us to do that,” our daughter said — but there had to be other kids along. Miraculously, given college schedules and two families’ busy lives, we gathered all three of our kids plus an uncle, an aunt and two cousins. It was a splendid trip, from the tough but beautiful first day ending at a little French inn with crème brûlée cooling on the window sill to our last celebratory night in Courmayeur, Italy.
David and I loved the hike so much that we returned a few years later to complete the 10-day loop, from Italy through Switzerland and back into Chamonix.