“Mont Blanc is the Monarch of mountains; They crowned him long ago On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, With a Diadem of snow.” — Lord Byron

There is a moment while climbing out of Vallee des Glaciers toward the Col de la Seigne when a series of false peaks besets the hiker. 

False peaks are a feature of any mountain endeavor, but this series is particularly frustrating.

You look at the hikers climbing ahead of you in the mist and say to yourself, “Oh, there they are, they are at the peak, I will be there in a moment.” And this continues for an impossible amount of time before you finally reach the col (French for mountain pass). 

From the Col de la Seigne, you can see one of the best and most expansive views on the Tour du Mont Blanc. You are looking from France into Italy as Mont Blanc rises above the black fang of the Aiguille Noir de Peuterey, before petering out along the Brouillard and Freney Ridges as two glaciers spill their fields of ice down into the valley below.

You can see basically the entire Italian side of the Tour as it unfolds before you, including the distant Grand Col Ferret, which you will have to scale to cross into Switzerland three days later.

On the late August day we finally reached the Col de la Seigne, the forecast had called for torrential rain.

But as Jacques, a recent college grad who had spent the summer working at the Refuge du Col du Bonhomme put it, “the forecast is always wrong.” Unpredictability is the only predictable hallmark of hiking in the Savoyard Alps. So of course, the rain never came.

Nevertheless, it was a day of intermittent light drizzle. Tatters of mist and low clouds moved in and out among the high peaks. 

My wife, Jessica, and I were dismayed to reach the col, after a day of surprisingly clear views back into the Vallee des Glaciers, to find ourselves almost entirely socked in.

The view of the Val Veny we’d heard so much about and worked so hard for was hidden behind a shroud of cloud.

However, the old mountain maxim runs: if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. 

So we sat and hydrated as the mist rose, broke apart, recongealed, and then fled altogether to reveal a mostly clear view we had spent the better part of an afternoon working to see.

This is the essence of the Tour du Mont Blanc. The false peaks, the hard work, the oscillations between hope and disappointment, the persistent deception. And, ultimately, the world-class rewards for patience and endurance.

The map and the math

Jessica and I, who were by no means in the best shape of our lives, with careers and children, set out to complete the classic route of the Tour du Mont Blanc without cable cars or rest days. 

The traditional route divides the approximately 100-mile circuit into eleven stages. It’s hiked counterclockwise, beginning and ending in Les Houches, a small French alpine village near Chamonix.

The route features 35,000 feet of elevation gain and 32,000 feet of descent. Over 11 days, a hiker essentially climbs and descends the equivalent of Mount Everest.

But the route is about more than statistics. 

Weather, culture, geology, terrain, and history combine to give the sense that something else is occurring besides mileage. 

It’s the experiences beyond the trail, like a rösti (a Swiss potato pancake) that healed your aching knee, the afternoon you waited for clouds to clear at the Col de la Seigne, or fatigue colliding with wonder at just the right spot with just the right slant of sun. These are the things that have lured people for centuries.

The Tour du Mont Blanc is perhaps Europe’s most famous long-distance hiking trail. This is a blessing and a curse. 

The trail is well-marked with a strong support system: comfortable mountain huts, villages to replenish supplies, and perfectly placed lunch spots with hearty regional fare.

But solitude seekers will not find it here, particularly in July and early August. Jessica and I hiked in late August and early September and found the crowds manageable. But, it wasn’t a lonely communion with nature.

The Tour traverses the seven valleys surrounding Mont Blanc — the highest point in Europe outside the Caucasus, and the culminating point of the Alps.

In terms of topographical prominence, Mont Blanc ranks 11th in the world, which partly explains why it has drawn mountaineers since the 18th century. The Arve Valley below is widely accepted as the cradle of mountaineering.

The legend and the lure

Most of Mont Blanc’s lure is due to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a scientist who traveled to Mont Blanc in the mid-18th century. 

Believing the summits of remote mountains held secrets about how the Earth was formed, he offered a reward to anyone who climbed to the top.

In his quest for the best route, Saussure created the Tour du Mont Blanc, traversing the seven valleys and circling the massif while documenting the botany and fauna along the way.

Others followed. Marc-Théodore Bourrit completed the loop in 1785. Tourists, writers, and adventurers soon flocked to the region.

Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley visited in 1816. They rented a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva and made day trips to the Savoyard Alps.

Alexandre Dumas visited in 1832 and later popularized the region with his book, Travel Adventures: In Switzerland.

Francis Trench wrote the classic travelogue A Walk Round Mt. Blanc in 1847, one of the first pieces of Mont Blanc literature to note how the mountain appears shorter than its surrounding features when viewed from Chamonix. 

“The honour of the real summit was to be given elsewhere,” he writes. It towers above neighboring peaks when viewed from higher vantages.

By the time Mark Twain visited in 1878, Alpine tourism was so well-established he could satirize it wholesale — and did. He skipped the climb in favor of the summit by telescope.

“I wanted to stand with a party on the summit of Mont Blanc, merely to be able to say I had done it, and I believed the telescope could set me within seven feet of the uppermost man,” Twain wrote.

Yet, even the wry Twain was taken with the intermixture of mountaineers of different cultures who moved through the valley during his stay. 

Indeed, part of what attracts the contemporary hiker is the cultural tapestry of adventures from inside and outside the valley. 

Three nations

The Tour du Mont Blanc journeys through France, Italy, and Switzerland. Each offers a distinct interpretation of the alpine experience through architecture, food, hospitality, trail signage, and even how shepherds manage their livestock.

When crossing from France into Italy, then Switzerland, and back to France, even the geography seems to speak to national variation.

Italy features dramatic high alpine traverses above deep valleys, Switzerland gentler meadows and pastoral landscapes, and France mixes austere vertical drama and glacial valleys.

The star is France. 

Hikers on the classic route spend the first two days and the last three in France. The entry point is Les Houches, a warmer and more authentic town than the cosmopolitan Chamonix.

The first day out features a relentless ascent to the Col de Voza, then down through the villages of Bionnassay and La Villette. Mountain fountains pour clean alpine water along the way. We pushed on to Les Contamines, in the heart of the Val Montjoie, to set ourselves up for a shorter Stage 2.

The Day 2 climb to the Col du Bonhomme is one of the steepest on the entire Tour. Don’t underestimate it. 

At the saddle sits the Refuge du Col du Bonhomme, one of the circuit’s more remote huts, with preposterous views. That’s where we posted up, but plenty hoofed it down into Le Champieux or Le Villes de Glaciers where a range of valley huts are on offer.

After crossing into Italy at the Col de la Seigne, you don’t see France again until Stage 9.

Italy: Stone, style and sustenance

Italy’s terrain was rugged and steep with protracted ascents and grueling descents on rocky ground. 

It compensated through culinary panache and hospitality. Specifically, the Rifugio Bonatti, named after mountaineer Walter Bonatti, served the best dinner of any hut on the circuit: homemade bread, fresh salad, pesto pasta, veal and mashed potatoes, and a dollop of panna cotta. 

The porch out front, arrayed with picnic tables, offers one of the best views of the Italian side of the massif. From there one can see Mont Blanc offset by the Grand Jorasses, the Dent du Géant spiking the sky, and off to the right the protrusion of Mont Dolent, the exact point where the borders of all three countries converge.

The climb there is no joke. It ascends from Courmayeur and is one of the steepest and longest on the entire tour. Courmayeur itself, and particularly the old town, is a gem. It arrives roughly mid-tour, which convinced more than a few fellow travelers to take a rest day. Some left the trail altogether. 

Little wonder, since it follows a long and rather unscenic descent from Rifugio Elisabetta through a ski resort. Elisabetta itself is beautifully situated and well-run, but unless you score a private room, you’ll sleep on an elongated communal mattress next to your fellow travelers. Remarkable in its way, but not for everyone.

Italy, with its stylishly dressed day hikers greeting you with Buon Giorno, its golden-stone buildings, its fertile valleys thick with flowers offset by the desolate highlands. The nation brings its own texture and flavor to the Tour.

Swiss interlude

The hiking on the Swiss side is more forgiving. The descent from the Grand Col Ferret is more gradual than the knee-grinding drops into Courmayeur or the plummet from the Col de Balme to Tré-le-Champ in France.

Stage 6 takes you from Italy into Switzerland. At the Grand Col Ferret, you’re met by broad green pastures, dented with small swales that make for quiet, windless lunch spots.

Stage 7 is the easiest of the eleven stages, as it departs the village of La Fouly, threading through forest broken by idyllic hamlets like Les Arlaches with its ancient wooden cabins, before arriving in the lake resort of Champex-Lac.

Stage 8 is tougher, though still easier than the tougher parts of Italy and France. The trail leaves the lakeside town, typically alive with tourists in high season but sleepy during our rainy visit, and climbs toward Alp Bovine, a small farm restaurant at the high point of the day with a view down to the Sion Valley. 

We each ate a rösti: a thick potato pancake with cheese made on the farm and bacon. Jessica, suffering badly from a balky left knee, claimed this magical pancake healed her ailment.

Our two Swiss days were the rainiest of the trip. But, the weather fit the journey through pine and larch forest and rustic villages.

Don’t underestimate the climb out of Trient, a sleepy village with its distinctive pink church. The ascent to the Col de Balme is the toughest of the Swiss section and belongs in the same conversation as the big French and Italian climbs.

Coming full circle

The Col de Balme straddles Switzerland and France. From there, you see the entire Chamonix Valley. You can pick out where you started and where you’ll finish. But if you’re a completionist, there’s still work to do.

Most of our fellow travelers were not completionists. Some completed only the first half of the trek, from Les Houches to Courmayeur. More hopped off after we crossed back into France, taking the cable cars down from the Col de Balme. 

While certainly tempted, I’m glad we kept going. The descent to Tré-le-Champ was arduous, but it ended with us staying at Argentière, a charming town up-valley from Chamonix and one of my favorite spots on the tour.

Stage 10 is probably the second-easiest day, as long as you keep your acrophobia in check. We scaled the ladders below the Tête aux Vents before reaching Lac Blanc, a still, mirror-like alpine lake with a small, busy restaurant that makes some of the best omelets you’ll find.

The trail through the Aiguilles Rouges Nature Reserve afforded the best wildlife of the trip, as Jessica spotted chamois first and then wild ibex with their dramatically curved horns.

I was kept company by a kestrel I’d first seen from the Col de Balme the previous day, and that seemed content to follow us here, where he continued his aerial acrobatics, including his unique feat of hovering in the mountain gusts with absolute stillness before diving abruptly after his prey.

From Lac Blanc, the trail drops to the Refuge de la Flagère, the traditional final hut on the classic route. 

The unpredictability and variation of weather in the Savoyard Alps is its defining characteristic. Francis Trench remarked in 1847 that his least favorite days were the clear ones, with “a monotone” of blue sky and bright sun. 

“It is a great mistake to suppose that settled and thoroughly fine days offer the best views of Alpine scenery,” he writes. “The outlines are far sharper, and the general colour of the peaks is usually seen to much superior advantage, during weather of another and more varied kind… A mixture of sunshine and cloud, and even occasional rain, have a tendency to produce far more striking effects.”

I’d learn the truth of that on the final day.

We started our final stage in an early morning misty rain, hopeful that the forecast calling for clear weather to move in late morning would prove accurate.

We’d heard the view of Mont Blanc and the rest of the massif from Le Brevent was the crown of the entire hike and we were a bit downcast at the thought of coming all this way to spend the final day with wet weather and low visibility. 

But that’s exactly what we got. 

After a torturous ascent through some of the most technically demanding terrain on the tour — difficult route-finding through rock ribs and cairnless stone corridors — we crested Le Brévent to find it cloaked in slate clouds. The only true peak we summited on the circuit, and we got nothing for it.

I stuck around the viewpoints just long enough to pout about it, as is my wont, and reflect on how weather is not just the background to the tour but the shaping force of the whole thing.

Of the few travelers still with us, many hopped off here at the Le Brévent cable car, and who could blame them. I was pretty pissed off and was sore tempted to just take the car down to the valley and call it a trip, but I am nothing if not a completionist. 

It came in clutch on this trip, as about 500 meters below the top, still in a foul mood, we came out on the ridge below Brévent and the clouds dispersed. 

It all emerged abruptly as we rounded a corner: Mont Blanc as the stately king with the Bossons Glacier spilling down its face.

To the left, the Aiguille Verte pierced its necklace of cloud, the granitic shark teeth of Les Drus beside it, the needle of the Aiguille du Midi, the snowy shoulder of Mont Blanc du Tacul rising to the pyramidal Mont Maudit. To the right, the Dôme du Goûter gave way to the craggy Aiguille du Goûter and down to the Aiguille du Bionnassay.

Had we taken the cable car, we’d have missed this classic view of the monarch of mountains and its courtiers. 

The final eleven kilometers from Le Brévent down to Les Houches were punishing, but no worse than other descents we’d survived. 

The drudgery was offset by a memorable lunch at the Refuge Bellachat, one of our favorite midday meals of the entire tour, as the savory omelet and rösti came with an unobstructed view of the famed massif.

I’d hoped our final day would be a bluebird, like the Grand Col Ferret crossing into Switzerland or the Col de Balme back into France.

But there was something about the clots of white clouds cleaving to the Bossons Glacier that gave a remarkable contrast to the peaks towering above.

It was mesmerizing to watch the rainy mists exploding out of the valley, rising impossibly fast and diverging only to converge before vanishing in the afternoon sun. A fitting end to a journey ruled by weather.

The Tour community

Hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc is different from backpacking in America. True wilderness is rare, mostly confined to the Aiguilles Rouges Reserve. But a large part of the experience is passing through remote alpine villages that modernity has mostly left untouched.

I won’t forget watching a cowherd use his Pyrenean sheepdogs to move his bell-wearing cattle across a hollow of terrain, the bells clanging as they poured back into view. Or waving to a man tending his flower garden on the outskirts of Villette. Or walking with a group of schoolchildren through the streets of Praz-de-Fort as they chatted on the way to their bus stop, joining us as we threaded through old stone cottages with neat stacks of firewood in compact yards.

At the Refuge du Col du Bonhomme, we met a retired French couple spending their golden years hiking from the North Sea to Nice. There, too, we befriended recent graduates from Marseille, now living in Romania, Portugal, and Paris, who initiated us into the pleasures of Beaufort cheese and other Savoyard specialties. 

At Rifugio Bonatti, we fell in with a muralist from Minnesota and her friend, perhaps the quickest uphill hiker we encountered, who would streak to the top of each pass and by the time the rest of us arrived, would be sitting out of the wind, reading a fat novel she carried. They stayed with us all the way to Flagère.

In Champex-Lac, we spent the evening with a New Zealand family whose patriarch was a central banker who’d seen the inside of Fort Knox and had strong recommendations for the Great Walks of his home country. 

On the last night, we talked with a solo trekker from St. Louis. He was a Philadelphia Eagles fan and the only hiker I met who preferred the descents.

In Trient, we ate dinner with a Swedish father and son who had done the Inca Trail and Kilimanjaro and held strong views on global shipping port logistics.

In Argentière, we ate at a pizzeria partly owned by a woman named Patti, who grew up in Montreal, fell in love with a Frenchman, moved to the sleepy Arve Valley to open a bed and breakfast, and when that didn’t work, bought the pizzeria despite knowing nothing about pizza in one of the more committed “it’ll work out” moves I’ve encountered. The pizza was great, for the record. Stone Bar Pizza, Argentière. Check it out.

At Rifugio Elisabetta, we stayed up too late with a convivial Irish couple who had firsthand insight into how Ireland’s corporate tax policy transformed Dublin’s real estate market, and who were happy to walk us through the prospects for a united Ireland over a couple of beers. (Not promising, apparently.)

There were annoying people too, of course. But the company on the trail, the camaraderie, the sheer variety of experience, was one of the better aspects of the journey.

Perspective

The Tour du Mont Blanc is difficult. It’s no mean feat.

That said, I’m aware it’s a middling accomplishment in the context of outdoor feats. Nothing drove that home more cleanly than sharing the trail with runners competing in the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc. 

The athletes start in Chamonix and complete the same circuit in under 46 hours. The winner this year, Tom Evans of the UK, finished in 19 hours and 19 minutes. More than 1,600 runners completed the route within the 46-hour limit.

Therefore, like so much about hiking in the Mont Blanc region, the achievement of walking around Mt. Blanc for an average of 7-9 hours a day for 11 days in a row, is a matter of perspective. 

Yet the perspective of the runners, who seemed on the whole miserable and completed some of the most scenic parts of the tour in the dark, didn’t exactly prompt envy. 

The Sisyphean circle

Anyone in reasonable shape with reasonable resolve can start in Les Houches and finish there eleven days later. 

That said, attrition was real. 

I’ve seen completion rates for the Tour cited as high as 85 percent, but I’d be surprised if the true number is that high. My wife and I were the only ones I knew of who started in Les Houches and finished the entire circuit without a rest day.

Most people were content to do half, or take a day off, or quit once they crossed back into France. Do your thing. But closing the circle felt right.

The tour is psychologically tough, mostly because you’re not hiking from low to high and staying there, the way you gain the high country on the John Muir Trail or hike toward a single summit on Kilimanjaro. Almost every day brings a steep climb followed by an equally steep descent.

Jessica hated the descents and not just for her joints, but because there’s something defeating about expending all that energy to reach the high country only to surrender it all and return to the valley floor. That is the Sisyphean nature of traversing Mont Blanc’s seven valleys.

It’s worth knowing that many of these trails are ancient, built long before modern trail construction with its switchbacks and oblique grades became standard. 

As you leave the Val Montjoie and begin the long climb to the Col du Bonhomme, you’re walking a path first used by Celtic tribes seeking a route into Italy, with stones and a bridge over the glacial stream installed by Roman engineers in the time of Augustus Caesar. Those engineers had no interest in contouring gently along the topography. They attacked slopes head-on. 

The descents are sometimes on rock ribs, treacherously slippery when wet, interwoven with sharp rocks and tree roots. 

I don’t want to oversell the difficulty. Completing the tour is not uncommon. But it isn’t a walk in the park. You’ll have to work, particularly given the fickle weather, the false peaks, and the relentlessly circular nature of the thing.

It’s not as straightforward as climbing a mountain, where there’s a clear summit and followed by a return to the lowlands. The Tour is more elusive than that, with its relentless ups and downs, its churn of mist and cloud. 

The story it told me was about patience, perspective, and endurance. It’ll tell you something different, shaped by whatever weather and terrain and timing you get. The seven valleys have something to tell you. Go find out what it is.