Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey (07.07.2023)
Written by hmsv1 (Hannah Vickers)
| Start point | Eccles hut (3,852m) |
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| Endpoint | La Visaille (Val Veny) (1,578m) |
| Characteristic | Alpine climbing |
| Duration | 12h 33min |
| Distance | 12.0km |
| Vertical meters | 520m |
| GPS |
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| Ascents | Aguille Blanche de Peuterey (4,112m) |
07.07.2023  |
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The Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey. I remember first hearing about this peak, which is located on the italian side of Mont Blanc, around 5 years ago when Tim was telling me about the time he’d guided it with one of his colleagues. It sounded like a proper adventure just to get to it and an overall cool outing with its reputation as being one of the trickier 4000ers. As things turned out, it was also the last 4000er I had to do, so it seemed quite fitting to have saved the best until last ;-) Up until this point it felt like I’d been quite fortunate with the weather and really great snow conditions this year, and the remainder of my final holiday week looked like it would give us good enough weather for an attempt at the Aiguille Blanche. After descending the Dom we had an easy tuesday and drove over to Courmayeur to stay the night so we could have an early start walking up to the Monzino hut the following day. Courmayeur I discovered, also does pizza rather well ;-) When we arrived at the nice forested car park at La Visaille in Val Veny, Tim spotted two guys he recognized – one being his friend and colleague Rick Marchant and the other being Phil Jardine, who is also a 4000m peak “collector” who we’d met a few times at various huts, but most recently at the Cosmiques hut a week or so earlier. They were also heading up to the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey but were planning to do it from the Monzino hut in 2 days rather than staying at the Eccles bivouac and using 3 days which we were doing. Anyway it was nice that we’d have some company at the Monzino hut and after sorting out gear and packing rucksacks we eventually got started on the hut approach shortly before 9.30am.
The walk up to the Monzino hut is fairly direct and ascends over 1000m over 3.4km (sort of like a hike up Store Blåmann in terms of distance and elevation). We had some very pleasant weather to walk up this morning as there were still some clouds around so it didn’t get too hot at any point. The first part of the walk ascends through a bit of forest, then crosses some small streams before ascending up a little more steeply to the first series of ladders and other via-ferrata type bits of equipment. After this it was mostly walking again with an impressive waterfall to the right of us with the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey soaring straight into the sky above. It was really quite an impressive sight. Having consumed pizza for lunch and pizza for dinner the previous day I felt like superwoman this morning and had more energy than at any other point during the previous few weeks, even though we were carrying pretty heavy packs with rope, two ice axes, cooking gear and 3 days worth of food, in addition to all the usual stuff. The next series of ladders, which were steeper and lasted for a bit longer, started at around 2300m. We didn’t put on any harnesses, but helmets seemed like a good idea. It was good fun to give the legs a bit of a break and use the arms a bit more, but unfortunately the via ferrata didn’t last all that long before we were back to walking on a path again. It was a really nice hut walk though and took a little over 3h in the slow and easy pace we were going. The afternoon was spent resting and chatting with Rick and Phil before dinner was served at 6.30. Despite having some pleasant weather on the hut walk, the afternoon was characterised by some pretty heavy rain showers that lasted well into the evening as well, more than there had been forecasted.
We woke up at 3am the next morning to eat breakfast and begin the ascent up to the Eccles bivouac. Rick and Phil had (unbeknown to me) already woken up earlier in the night as they’d planned to ascend the Aiguille Blanche from the Monzino hut. Unfortunately since it had still been raining and very windy at both times they got up, they soon dropped that plan and decided to do the same as us and sleep at the Eccles bivouac instead, but left the hut a little before us. It was a fairly steep hike up to the Brouillard glacier but the air was fairly mild since it had been overcast for most of the night. It also meant that there wasn’t much of a refreeze on the glacier, but the snow conditions were fairly OK all things considered. Rick and Phil who were a little way ahead, had also done a very nice job of breaking a trail in the semi-frozen snow, which we were also very grateful for! After a few hours, and about an hour after sunrise, the fog started to finally clear and we got a great view up the Brouillard glacier towards the rib of rock on which the Eccles hut was perched. The Brouillard glacier is steep and is bordered on its west side by the impressive Brouillard ridge and Punta Innominata on its east side. Overall its a very impressive place to be and experience. The upper part of the glacier brought us up onto a kind of snow ridge which led up to the foot of the rocky rib which needed to be climbed to reach the Eccles bivouac up at 3852m. After the previous afternoon/evening rain showers, it was now very thoroughly covered in a pristine white coat of new snow. While quite pretty to look at it did get me wondering how much new snow would be covering the tricky part of the north ridge of the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey, which we really needed to be snow-free. In any case, the new snow probably elevated the PD+ climb to something more like a PD+++. When we arrived at the bivouac hut it was about 10am and a couple from Chamonix were already there, as well as Rick and Phil and another 2 guys. In addition another climbing pair turned up soon after we did, making a total of 10 people who were wanting to stay in a 6-person hut! Luckily the other 4 dudes decided they would check out the old bivouac hut which was located one abseil down the mountainside, and any fears over having to share a bed were soon put to rest. The new Eccles hut was itself in a pretty spectacular location and it felt like quite a novel experience just to be there. On each side of the hut there was 3 “beds” in a kind of bunk bed style, but it looked more like 2 rows of seats with a mattress under each and a fold out bed above. In practice, sleeping on any of them gave the feeling of being in a coffin. Neverthless it was a great atmosphere and the young (they were at least 10 years younger than me!) climbing pair from Chamonix, Carmen and Victor, proved to be really good company and lovely to chat with during the rest of the day. They were planning to climb the Innominata ridge up to Mont Blanc, while we were going in the other direction towards the Aiguille Blanche. Rick and Tim decided to check out the route (and conditions) to the Col Eccles and returned in the early afternoon looking quite worn out. They’d not only checked out the route but also put in a lot of effort to make a good track all the way up to the Col Eccles and down the other side to the Freney glacier ahead of our midnight start.... The remainder of the afternoon was super chilled and when the clouds finally cleared it was a beautiful view down the Brouillard glacier and across to the hills on the other side of the Val Veny. Both Carmen and Victor agreed to a midnight wake-up too which made the logistics of getting out of bed a bit more straightforward. We were all in bed before 6pm!
I didn’t have an amazing sleep, and got a bit too warm and very thirsty at one point, but I did at least get a couple of hours sleep. Getting ready progressed a bit slowly as there wasn’t much space for all 6 of us to move around inside the hut, so some headed out onto the balcony to put stuff on. Tim boiled up some water for a coffee although I have to admit I couldn’t really stomach coffee at that time of night. At least he got more to drink after not sleeping particularly well either! Carmen and Victor left first, then Rick and Phil – and finally Tim and I. We climbed a couple of metres up the hard snow behind the hut to reach some abseil gear. Here we made a short descent down over a rocky section to reach the edge of the Brouillard glacier. Once down on the snow we made what felt like a very long traverse, moving sideways in the excellent ledge that Rick and Tim had kicked earlier the previous afternoon. Gradually we traversed a bit more upwards before climbing more directly up to the Col Eccles on what felt like 50-degree slopes; by now both my calves and right quad had been burning for a while, so I was fairly glad to reach the col and take a short breather there before continuing down the other side. The snow had refrozen very nicely at least, and since Tim and Rick had kicked such big steps into the slopes on their recce it was simply a matter of facing into the slopes and stepping carefully down into the nice big steps one by one. As we neared the bottom of the steeper slope below the col and met the Freney glacier the snow conditions changed pretty rapidly and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves wading through calf deep wind transported snow. I had thought the conditions would improve as we walked across the glacier and up to the Col de Peuterey but the only difference between the snow at the bottom of the couloir below the Col Eccles, and the snow at the Col de Peuterey was that the snow below the Col de Peuterey was fluffier and less wind affected. There was still a good 30cm of it though! Rick and Phil, who’d started before us, had done a pretty solid job of making tracks – not sure we’d have gotten very far without them. By the time we’d approached the steeper snow slopes leading up to the trickiest part of the climbing on the north ridge it was already 3.30am and we were just below 4000m. On the other side of the Freney glacier we could see moving spots of light from headtorches that were headed up towards the Freney Pillar, and it was pretty incredible to be surrounded by the outlines of such impressive terrain that were only just vaguely illuminated by the moonlight. Tim put in a good effort to get us up the first pitch, but the rock was just plastered in useless new snow. The ice axes had nothing to bite into as they would og right through the snow and hit the rock underneath. On the hand it was pretty impossible to climb the rock with just the hands since it was covered in so much snow. It was pretty obvious that with the conditions as they were, we wouldn’t be able to reach the summit and descend safely within the time constraints we had, as we needed to get back to the Col Eccles before the sun heated up the avalanche-prone slopes below. So a bail was the only sensible option. While I have to admit I would have liked to have kept trying to get a bit further, I was at the same time not completely gutted at having to turn around at that point..... I was feeling super tired, cold and pretty much every one of my leg muscles were tight and uncooperative..... It wasn’t the kind of feeling I wanted to summit my last 4000er.
I was mostly dreading the climb back up to the Col Eccles, but actually it was the trudging back across the Freney glacier in the deep snow that was most tiring. Climbing back up in the good steps was surprisingly effortless, and just as we reached the col, we looked behind us to see the most incredible sunrise colours above the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey and Grandes Jorasses in the distance. It was like the perfect way to say a farewell to the Aiguille Blanche and a nice way to remember what I needed to come back to. After a fairly quick downclimb from the Col Eccles and a short abseil, we still had to make the traverse around the edge of the steep Brouillard glacier to reach the bottom of the rock section which would take us back up to the Eccles hut. Having traversed this bit in the dark only a couple of hours earlier, I hadn’t quite realised how long it went on for. Anyway, once we were done with the icy traverse it was kind of a relief to scramble back up some nice rock, the only nice snow-free rock we got to put our hands on today (!) and reach the Eccles hut again at the top. It was still only around 7am by the time we got there, so we took the opportunity to huddle inside and boil some water for a coffee. Rick and Phil joined us soon after. It already felt like we’d been on a bit of an expedition after having been across to the Aiguille Blanche and back, but in reality we were still up at over 3800m and had another 2200m to get back down to the car park, so after a well earned break at the Eccles hut we began the descent back down to the Monzino hut. We abseiled one rope length and then downclimbed the rest of the rocky rib to the snowy shoulder at the top of the glacier. It was then a matter of plodding back down the track, which was surprisingly hard on the quads; the snow was still very well frozen and in places fairy steep, neither of which I had paid much attention to when we walked up the day before. Anyway, it took around 3 hours to reach the Monzino hut, and took yet another break here to enjoy a good late morning coffee and cake as well as taking off the boots for a little while before continuing the final 1000m of descent down to Val Veny, most of which passed by surprisingly quickly and it was around 2.30pm when we arrived back in the car park. It was sort of mixed emotions to arrive back having not been to the summit, but on reflection it had been an amazing experience, from the hospitality at the Monzino hut to the wild location of the Eccles hut and the journey across the Col Eccles and Freney glacier to even get near the Aiguille Blanche. And I was probably too tired to fully enjoy the climb anyway so I was in a way relieved to have this as a peak to come back to another year. Hopefully next year ;-)
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