On the route of the Patrouille des Glaciers, risk is all around

Risk is all around as Simon Akam continues his training on a trail run of Patrouille des Glaciers.Illustration by Photo Illustration by The Globe and Mail. Source images: Courtesy of Simon Akam

Just before 1:30 p.m. yesterday afternoon, I stood just below the summit of Rosablanche, a 3,336-metre peak in the Swiss canton of Valais. The day was clear, and on the horizon to the southeast stood the Matterhorn, the 4,478-metre peak that overshadows the resort of Zermatt. From this angle the peak did not show its most pyramidal side – as featured on cases of Caran d’Ache colouring pencils. Instead the mountain, 25 straight-line kilometres away, presented a different, hunchback aspect. Behind us, much nearer, lay Mont Fort, a 3,328-metre peak above the village of Verbier. Zermatt and Verbier mark the beginning and end of the Patrouille des Glaciers (PDG), the ski mountaineering race that I hope to undertake next year.

My overwhelming thought, as I stood on Rosablanche, was that this was a really long way to go.

This week, in my journey to master ski mountaineering, I undertook the course of the PDG in slow time, to get a sense of the terrain. This trip, again organized by Swiss mountaineering school Bergpunkt, was formerly termed Patrouille des Glaciers gemütlich – comfortable Patrouille des Glaciers. The intention was to do the route over four days. (The race itself is a single day. The best teams, intimidatingly, cover 57.5 kilometres of distance and over 4,000 m of climb in less than six hours.)

With caution, Simon Akam undertakes a trial run of the Patrouille des Glaciers and embraces the highs and lows of taking risks

As occurred often this winter, conditions meant we could not fully adhere to the plan. In the race, the Patrouille starts in Zermatt and passes over Tête Blanche before coming down in Arolla, a high village at around 2,000 m. However, the initial glacier sections were inadequately snow-covered, with heightened crevasse danger. The Bergpunkt team determined we would instead begin in Arolla, and head onward from there to Verbier.

Our group comprised five men and one woman. While the group was gender imbalanced, I was struck by how ski mountaineering is not an elite activity here. That is different to my home country of Britain, where winter sports tend to involve international travel and therefore have a sizable financial barrier to entry. Here by contrast we had a bus driver, a hospital maintenance worker and a policewoman, all profiting from the proximity of the mountains. From Arolla we climbed up the Glacier de Pièce toward the Vignettes Hut, a refuge at 3,160 m.

In these huts you sleep in shared dormitories, and solid meals are served in the evening. In winter, water is in perennial short supply, sold at nine francs per 1.5 litre bottle. The Vignettes is a place tinged with tragedy, too. In 2018, seven ski tourers, most of them Italian, died in bad weather some 500 m from the hut when they became disorientated. That served as a reminder of something that has been apparent throughout this project – this activity, which beguiles me, is fundamentally not without risk.

The next morning our intention was to climb the Pigne d’Arolla, the 3,796-metre peak behind the cabin. Again, this was a liberal interpretation of the PDG route, which doesn’t ascend the mountain, but the Pigne is a celebrated ski summit. From Arolla it presents an intimidating rampart, but the other side is glaciated and, using climbing skins to gain uphill traction on the snow, we could ski all the way from the Vignettes Hut to the summit.

The descent embodied the extraordinary uphill/downhill ratio that ski mountaineering offers. We’d spent two days climbing the peak. We were down in Arolla in less than two hours. Our guide emphasized that the competence on skis of everyone in the group was key to our rapid movement, and I felt real satisfaction at my personal progress. I am not yet as neat a skier as I would like to be – there is an undeniable aesthetic element to my aspirations here – but I can now descend wild, ungroomed terrain under control, while wearing a rucksack. That is something I was certainly incapable of before this year.

During our descent too, as we came close to the hut, I saw that a serac, an ice cliff, had collapsed above the route, leaving a trail of debris down to our tracks. The guide explained that this route, while not somewhere to linger, was still the best option. The alternative was heavily crevassed. As with the tragedy that took place near the Vignettes Hut in 2018, here was another reminder that this was an environment in which all risk is relative, and decisions often involve compromise and trade-offs.

The next morning we ascended from Arolla to the Pas de Chèvres, a pass at 2,854 m. More or less back on the PDG route, we entered a high-altitude cirque, dominated by Mont Blanc de Cheilon. We came to the Dix Hut, a shelter at 2,980 m whose three resident dogs included Issa, a Samoyed. Her “ID card,” drawn on a blackboard, states “Characteristics: Loves belly rubs.” That afternoon, after a descent on magnificent powder, we drank beers and lounged outside as a helicopter flew out rubbish and brought in fresh supplies, loads dangling by cable.

It seemed such a happy, polyglot place – I with my German-speaking party, others French, Italian, English, American. Up at almost 3,000 m, international harmony seemed possible. Yet that was a simplification. Alpine mountain huts are a very male world – our party’s 5:1 ratio seemed pretty typical. Thus far it had seemed an entirely white environment too, skin tone as well as snow cover. That seemed to change when we met a party from a Swiss institution for adolescents in difficulty, ethnically diverse teenagers helmed by muscular staff with shaved heads and earrings. The youngsters looked out of their comfort zone, but in a good way.

That was the night before. At breakfast at 5:30 a.m., there were rumours of strange noises in the darkness. I never got entirely to the bottom of what happened, but our guide said later he’d heard that one of the kids had been found in the middle of the night, shivering outside the hut, in such a state that the staff considered a defibrillator, and instead called for a helicopter, which flew them out. My assessment from the night before now seemed overly optimistic – perhaps this still felt to some like a very exclusionary environment, somewhere they were not welcome.

Breakfast led to a 6:30 start, our last and longest day. We skied down below the hut toward the frozen Dix reservoir, again largely on the PDG course. In the final section above the lake we heard wumm-geräusche – German for the booming noise of an unstable, avalanche-prone snowpack shifting under your weight. A little learning is a complicated thing – I now knew what this was, and what it meant, but I still wasn’t sure how I would have responded had I been making the route-finding decisions. As it was, our guide picked a careful way down, without further incident.

This final day involved about 22 lateral kilometres and some 1,400 m of vertical. At the far end of the lake – in stifling sun – we climbed up another pass, and then slogged up the Prafleuri glacier toward Rosablanche. By the time we crossed over two final cols into Verbier we had been out for 10 hours. The return-to-the-world sensation at the end of a ski tour was stronger than ever – dismal, slushy slopes led to a village surrounded by bare pasture, full of wealthy anglophones. It was a grievous contrast to our private glacier world.

I felt on this tour how much I have learned this winter. But this excursion also drove home how much further there is to go. Our long, last day was less than half the horizontal distance and climb of the full PDG. To do that in a single stint will require a world of work.

Simon Akam is a British journalist and author. His first book, The Changing of the Guard – The British Army since 9/11, published in 2021, was a Times Literary Supplement book of the year and won the Templer First Book Prize. Simon can be found at @simonakam on Twitter, @simon.akam on Instagram.