Outside Magazine

On a partly cloudy afternoon in August 2019, I followed a Spanish mountain guide named Simón Elías up steep granite terraces on the north face of a peak in the French portion of the Mont Blanc massif. The 12,561-foot summit of the mountain, called Les Courtes, loomed 1,000 feet above where we were climbing, and 2,000 feet below us lay the Argentière glacier, its surface striated with crevasses. We had entered the Argentière basin across a low point in the ridgeline called the Col des Cristaux—which in English translates to Crystal Pass—before traversing laterally across the mountainside. On another rope, photographer Nicolas Blandin moved alongside a 66-year-old named Christophe Péray.

The topography was complicated: fresh snow stuck to the mountainside, and I periodically lost sight of Elías ahead of me as he moved behind rocks. Communication with Blandin and Péray was only possible through echoing shouts. 

I belayed Elías as he put in a cam before positioning himself on the face to uncover a four. Four is French for oven, but in this context, the word refers to cavities in the mountainside that, in the broadest sense, resemble somewhere you could bake bread. English has various equivalent geological terms: alpine-type fissure, alpine cleft, or, most simply, pocket. This one was on a snow-covered ledge, a couple feet wide at its broadest. Unless you were an expert, however, it would be hard to distinguish the site from any of 1,000 other such ledges on the face.