Jared Williams

Ironically, the longest hike of my life began with a train ride. Departing Chamonix, France for Les Houches, a mere fifteen minutes down the Arve river, I was on my way to the starting point for the Tour du Mont Blanc - known as the TMB. The TMB is a 105 mile celebration of the tallest mountain in Western Europe, Mont Blanc (15,774 ft). Circling but never summiting Mont Blanc, the TMB weaves through France, Italy, and Switzerland, and has been walked since 1767 when a Geneva scientist went searching for the best route to climb the then un-summited peak.

I am hiking solo - a new experience for me. Although, I have completed a couple multi-day treks, I am not exactly John Muir or even a moderately successful Boy Scout. I feel nervous about hiking by myself, but many times more excited to try something new.

Accompanying me is my Osprey backpack, three of every Clif Bar from the convenience store, and Kev Reynolds’ The Tour of Mont Blanc guide book. The book is the Bible of the TMB, everyone on the trail has a copy. The book partitions the TMB into 10 stages to be completed over 10 to 12 days. I will be following the classical counter-clockwise route, and hope to complete the TMB in eight days. Absent from my backpack is a tent; the TMB is a “hut hike”, meaning that on every stage there is a mountain refuge where hikers may have dinner and spend the night.

The train arrives in Les Houches. Following my guide book feels like a return to the Mapquest era: “From the railway station, cross the bridge…continue west past the tourist office…walk under the road tunnel…” I have never felt more accomplished to reach the starting point of a trail.

Stage one of the TMB is arguably the tour’s easiest, although it can be spiced up by embarking on one of two variant routes. Variant routes exist throughout the tour and promise better views in exchange for more climbing. Feeling sanguine, I choose all of the above and do both variants. Variant routes are like when you open Maps, fall down the proverbial rabbit hole, and pretty soon you’ve dedicated yourself to understanding the topographical intricacies of each Galapagos Island - once a variant caught my attention I had to explore it. Enjoying the challenge and basking in the views, I would end-up spending almost half of my time on the TMB on variant routes.

While day one was idyllically sunny, the weather of day two was not: heavy rain came first, then thunder & lightning, a mountain crossing in snow, and it all crescendoed in a descent turned muddy slip n’ slide. I loved it. Hiking in the storm felt epic, rugged, and as primal as life can feel on a 21st century well maintained trail when you have a guide book and (ideally) no predators. Making decent time, I stumble into Refuge de Mottets at 5:30pm, and am informed that instead of sleeping in the traditional refuge hall, I’ll be sleeping in the building reserved for tour guides. Major upgrade. The defining quality of most refuge sleeping halls is that there is zero space between beds - your “bed” is a portion of a big mat, on which strangers roll into each other all night. On the other hand, the guides’ quarters feature a luxurious two feet between cots. Later I learned that a group which had reserved 13 beds at Mottets, had arrived with 25 people. With the next refuge a half day’s hike away and the storm ongoing, Mottets had little choice but to accommodate the group, and thus were re-shuffling the entire refuge.

After explaining to my new roommates that my tour group consisted of me guiding myself, the guides showed me how much better life is in the guides’ quarters. Frankly, Saturday Night Live could do a half-decent sketch on guides’ quarters at TMB refuges. Perched at the ends of our beds, the group went in circles topping each other’s “you won’t believe what happened to my group” stories as each guide sipped from a flask of liquor they described as the signature of their local village. By night’s end, I had opinions on liquor from seven Alps villages, and a nickname from my roommates: “The Solo Guide of Mottets”. Before bedtime one of the guides shared that an Argentinian man had stopped by camp earlier in the evening and claimed that the weather for the next day would be much improved. I loved this part of the trail: in terms of directions this was the age of MapQuest, but in terms of information we were in the age of the Pony Express.

During day three and four I completed four stages, almost 34 miles, and crossed from France into Italy and then into Switzerland. On que, greetings transitioned from “Bonjour” to “Ciao” and back again. I often walked with friends I’d made at the refuge the night before, but inevitably there was alone time on the trail. I came to revel in these times. Walking solo felt like true solitude. In the non-TMB world, when confronted with relative solitude I transform the moment into media consumption time. I throw on a podcast, or scroll Twitter. I do anything to avoid doing nothing. These moments of tranquility felt new and refreshing. They were some of my favorite moments of the trek.

Not that every moment of solitude was a moving meditation. Walking solo, you find yourself to be quite the comedian, and I’d make many jokes to myself. Of course, you sing too. I distinctly, remember a moment during day three when I hummed a Sara Bareillis song and a Bo Burnham song back-to-back, and then stopped in my tracks humored by my mental DJ.

Day four was a delight: book-ended by steep climbs, the majority of the walk traversed gently undulating hills and featured uninterrupted views of Mont Blanc. I finished the day at La Puele, a dairy farm converted into a refuge. All refuges ask hikers to wear flip-flops inside the refuge, but La Puele is next level: upon entering, hikers are directed to a massive yurt where a complimentary pair of crocs is provided for your stay. A yurt, next to a dairy farm, on the side of a mountain, with rows upon rows of every color croc - it is quite the scene.

With my yellow crocs on, I reflected on reaching the tour’s halfway point. After four days, waking up, prepping my pack, and walking felt more normal. I had a beard occupying the in-between state of being too short to block the sun but too long to enable proper sunscreen application, and some newfound backpacking opinions:

1. There are few incentives to take an early lunch as convincing as knowing it will lighten your backpack. Speaking of incentives, nothing encourages reading a book more than lugging it around for a week to give yourself the opportunity to read it.

2. Say hi to everyone on the trail. It’s you, the mountains, and someone walking the other direction every 20 minutes - say hi!

3. Crossing international borders on a trek is uniquely satisfying. With a boyish grin I would stand with one foot in Italy and the other in Switzerland, and chuckle that only half my body was in the EU.

I also began to grasp the rhythms of the post-dinner refuge scene. Debating the merits of various backpacking equipment was the go-to social icebreaker. The group playing cards was generally the most fun. There was always a small group huddled over maps debating variant routes for the next day. Coffee was consumed late into the night, which I originally found odd, but learned was a hiker’s attempt to encourage the body to use the facilities at the refuge and not nature’s during the next day - very smart. Each evening at the refuge, people from all over the world would share stories and compare cultures - I looked forward to it everyday.

The morning of day five was gloriously downhill and social - it was the most people I had seen on the trail since day one. I even met a Cal Poly alumna who had hiked the TMB five years prior, and had returned for round two with her whole family. The lusciously green hills combined with a slight smell of manure was reminiscent of San Luis Obispo when the wind is blowing the wrong way. Each morning of the TMB, I made a video for my family. This morning I boasted that I shockingly did not have any blisters and that today would be the easiest of the tour. By day’s end, both those statements were false.

I arrived in the lakeside village of Champex by lunchtime. The plan was to relax the remainder of the day and complete the TMB over the three following days. Then, pinned to a refuge in town, I was greeted by the weather forecast: a storm was hitting the Alps in three days. After my Jungle Cruise of a day two, I had concluded that the biggest downside to hiking in a storm wasn’t getting wet or the muddy trail, but rather the absolute loss of views. Resolved to experiencing my remaining miles in clear skies, I relaxed long-enough to band-aid my first blister and embarked on the next stage: a 3,937 ft. climb to the highest point on the TMB, Fenetre d’Arpette.

The climb was tenaciously vertical, and halfway-up transformed from a typical uphill hike into scampering roughshod up boulders. Reaching the summit was a window into a new landscape: trotting along the mountain’s ridge were a family of ibex, to my left was the cascading Trient glacier, and unfolding below me was a grandiose valley leading to the town of Trient. During my hike I had been reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson - the tale of his walk on the Appalachian Trail (AT), the famed trail from Georgia to Maine. In one of my favorite passages, Bryson says “If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy - something we could all do with more of in our lives”. Exhaustedly plopped on the summit of the Fenetre, I grinned from ear-to-ear at the picturesque view, a low-level ecstasy.

The day five audible meant I would complete the TMB in seven days. I spent day six and seven walking with Alicia and Nathan, a delightful couple from New Zealand and the best friends I made on the trail. They were also finishing the TMB and we joyously shared trail reflections over these final days. Day six was actually my easiest day on the trail, and while day seven was surprisingly brutal it felt like the triumphant final miles of a marathon.

In some ways, the TMB is fundamentally anti-climatic: you devote 105 miles and at least a week of your life to circling the monarch of the Alps, but never summit it. The end of the trail is arguably anti-climatic as well: no “Congratulations” sign or cheeky “0 kms to Les Houches” trail-marker. The trail simply becomes a road and that is it, you have completed the TMB! While the TMB may summit peaks, there isn’t a metaphorical “peak” of the hike. In a week full of allegories from nature to the real world, it was this theme of reveling in the journey which most resonated with me.