Chamonix: Ice & Vallée Blanche Weekend

Our logic is simple: when you can go to Chamonix, why wouldn't you go to Chamonix?

So here's the plan. We fly to Geneva on the Friday, and by Saturday afternoon we're sleeping in a hut at 3,613 metres with Mont Blanc more or less outside the window. Sunday we get up at half four, walk twenty minutes across a glacier in the dark, and climb a 350-metre ribbon of ice called the Chéré Couloir — while everybody else is still queuing for the first cable car down in the valley.

That's the whole reason for the hut, by the way. The Chéré is one of the most popular ice routes in the massif, and its biggest hazard isn't the climbing — it's ice knocked loose by the parties above you. Sleeping twenty minutes from the base means we're on it empty, an hour and a half before anyone else arrives.

Then, and this is the bit that makes people laugh when you describe it out loud, we put skis on and come home. Down the Vallée Blanche. Twenty kilometres, 2,800 metres of descent, off-piste on a glacier, all the way back into town.

One more thing worth saying: our guide is Gerrit Egnew, and he's a geek. Data engineer at Interlaken by day, he's a certified IFMGA guides when the adventure calls. Some of our members already had an adventure with him in Chamonix last year. It was excellent, and that's the point where we stopped wondering whether we'd scouted the right person. So we're building these adventures with him now — for you.

Do you need to be an ice climber? No. If you've climbed outdoors on rock and you're comfortable skiing off-piste in snow that hasn't been groomed for you, you've got what you need. Saturday morning is a proper skills session — transceiver drills, tool technique, rope work — and the guides watch everyone ski before a single decision gets made. Two guests per guide on the ice — the guide is flat about that. On the skills-and-skiing day the ratio opens up to one guide for six, which is how those days are meant to run.

Do you need to be fit? Reasonably, yes. There's almost no hiking involved, but you want to be someone who could put in 1,200 metres of ascent in a day and still enjoy dinner.

Six spots. Three IFMGA guides. One very good weekend.

I mean, c'mon. It's one of the most epic playgrounds for adventurous geeks like us — and it fits in a long weekend.