The Tour du Mont Blanc has been my biggest and most rewarding challenge… the impact it had, has affected my whole life and will be with me forever!

This year….i am preparing for “Chamonix to Zermatt”, a bigger challenge on lots of different levels and i am very much looking forward to it…especially as i may end up doing it solo….which terrifies me and excites me all at once! I never saw myself as a lone adventurer but i am not ready to stop living my dreams…so if i have to do it alone…Bring it on!!!!!

If anyone has any good advice regarding Chamonix to Zermatt, please feel free to comment as i could really do with the help!

Gaelle

In the near future, we will be posting a day by day account of our progress around the Tour, so you can find out exactly what we got up to, and hopefully as a motivator for anybody else who might be thinking about undertaking the Tour of Mont Blanc or a similar long distance walk.

In the meantime, we need to start collecting the oustanding sponsorship money. If you haven’t yet paid your sponsorship, please get in touch with either myself or Gaëlle.

We’ve got no accomodation pre-booked at all, so it will be a case of getting off the plane, jumping on a train and making our way across the border into France and heading for our start point of Les Houches. There we’re going to have to find somewhere to bed down for the night (probably under a tree on a campsite watching the stars!) before heading straight off on our walk in the morning.

The bags are all packed and now we are just drumming our fingers impatiently. Gaëlle even found time to test the weight of her bag before work this morning. Check out the picture below…

As the date of departure gets closer and closer, it’s becoming more and more important to get our confidence and motivation up as well as our general level of fitness. As it is, I think we’re succeeding - we’re both just desperate to get the trip underway, the excitement is becoming too much to bear.

We’re desperately hoping for an improvement in the weather so we can get a final surge of hard training in before we head off for the main event in just a few weeks.

Check out a YouTube video of the weekend here…

We drove out to just past Dartmeet on Dartmoor, and hiked down valley from the car park, under Sharp Tor and out to Mel Tor. From there we stomped down the steep hill from the Tor, into the decidious woods beside the river and along to Luckey Tor. We were intending to camp here, until we came across a large sign saying “No Camping or Fires”. We’d liked the look of Mel Tor as we walked past it, so we decided to stomp back up the hill and camp there. This turned out to be a real test for Étienne, who was carrying a big rucksack for the first time! To his credit though, he made it back up the hill and was rewarded with being able to play his Nintendo whilst we made dinner and set up the tent.

We had a good opportunity to test out some of the gear we’ve bought for when we go away in July. Our tiny, little lightweight MSR Pocket Rocket gas stove worked brilliantly - as long as you can get it out of the wind. It’s also pretty noisy if you have to turn it up to full blast (which you shouldn’t have to do if it’s shielded from the wind). Coupled with boil-in-the-bag meals and some instant drinks, we fed ourselves quickly and simply and with the minimum of washing up.

Whilst Étienne and Gaëlle slept in my little 2 man tent, I had the dubious pleasure of testing out one of our Rab Survival Zone bivvy bags. Thankfully it was an absolutely beautiful evening… the sky was crystal clear and the stars twinkled perfectly all night. With no cloud cover it was pretty cold, and I woke with condensation on the inside of the bivvy bag. It was nothing serious though, and obviously in warmer climes would be even less of an issue. All in all, I had one of the most stunning overnight experiences I’ve had in the outdoors.

After breakfast the next morning, we had time for some bouldering. We set Étienne four boulder problems and he got stuck right into figuring them out. Before now, Étienne had never really taken to climbing or bouldering, he was willing to give it a go but didn’t have a real passion for it. This little session seemed to change him completely though. He loved being set little challenges to work out and was really stubborn about completing them all! It turned out to be his favourite part of the whole trip.

Check out a YouTube video of the weekend here…

Hit the “Continue Reading” link to find out exactly what we got up to!

We drove up on Thursday night after work so we had the whole of Friday to get a hill in. I decided to chuck Gaëlle in at the deep end of walking up mountains in this country by taking her up the north ridge of Tryfan in the Ogwen valley. We rolled out of the Honda Hilton early in the morning and started up the track to the north ridge (which was all of 20 feet from where we were parked). Gaëlle was surprised and pleased by the rapid height gain we were able to achieve and was really enjoying the hands on scrambling (putting her climbing and bouldering skills to good use) - see the photo below…

Further up the mountain though, at about 2,500ft, we ran into some trickier scrambling over a substantial drop with some pretty significant exposure (OK, I may have taken us a bit off route!) which almost induced a full on panic attack in Gaëlle. It took us a little while, but she managed to battle through it and get her nerve back (I’m sure she’ll make her own post about it!), and before long we were on the summit…

Saturday was our ‘big’ day. Whilst we were in the Ogwen valley I wanted to hit the summits of all the main Glyderau, especially Y Garn, after having to retreat off in bad weather the year before. I was keen to make it up Y Garn and walk over to Glyder Fawr and back down Y Gribin, a pretty big walk on its own. But if Gaëlle handled that OK, I wanted to make a quick run up to Glyder Fach, before heading down Y Gribin. We paced ourselves well and Gaëlle easily handled the long distances, so we did manage to take in all the summits before heading back down Y Gribin. Check out the photos below…

From left to right: 1. Gaëlle on the summit of Y Garn. 2. The summit of Glyder Fawr, looking over to the Snowdon horseshoe. 3. The two of us taking a breather on the way to Glyder Fach. 4. Me testing the cantilever stone on the summit of Glyder Fach.

As it was Gaëlle’s first time in the hills, and therefore her first time in North Wales, we had to go up Snowdon. We stomped up the PYG track (’the voie normale’ or ’standard’ route up the hill). Snowdon isn’t a pretty mountain, and any charm it might have still harboured due to its height and stature, is ruined by the gaping scar of the railway track that runs up to its summit. The café that used to exist on top was also a shameful scar on the mountain. However, the current situation is possibly worse… we arrived on the top to find three JCBs shifting earth where the café used to be!

Shelter

Although we will be using huts and refuges (and even possibly chalets in the valleys!), we also want to wild camp where possible. We also need emergency shelter in case we are benighted unintentionally. To cover all these bases, whilst keeping everything as lightweight and compact as possible, we’ve decided to forego a tent and opt for bivvy bags and a basha - Ray Mears style! We’ve purchased a couple of Rab Survival Zone bivvy bags to couple with (still to be bought) lightweight sleeping bags and cut down sleeping mats. The army basha (basically a reinforced, waterproof tarp), can then be erected, ridge-style, over the top of us incase the weather is really, really inclement. Below is a pic of Gaëlle testing the system out…

This gives us an incredibly lightweight shelter solution, that is also very versatile - the basha can be used as a ground sheet, an emergency poncho, or even a makeshift stretcher should it be necessary.

Cooking

Again, we’ve decided to go for the lightest weight, most compact solution we can think of. We’ve just bought a truly tiny MSR Pocket Rocket gas cartridge stove and intend to combine this with a lightweight (titanium?) brew mug for an all-in-one drink and meal kit (a tip I picked up from the army lads in Scotland). To make this work, we will need to carry a few boil-in-the-bag meals and instant drink powder - Just add water to the mug and chuck the boil-in-the-bag meal into it. When it’s boiled, eat the meal straight from the bag and chuck the instant drink powder into the water for a hot brew! For the meals, we intend to buy a couple of army ration packs from a surplus store (which come with a host of other useful items, like water purification tablets). The instant drinks are easy, as Gaëlle and I both work for Drinkmaster, who manufacture single portion, instant, powdered hot drinks in tiny, lightweight packaging.

These two systems should cover us in terms of shelter, cooking and emergency survival for a very minimal weight impact - important when it’s going to be plastered to our backs for 12 days! We will be ruggedly testing the various bits of kit over the coming weeks and will let you know how they stand up!

On Saturday, we had a photo shoot for a local paper. Gaëlle was nervous to begin with, but I think she secretly enjoyed it once she got into the swing of it! The photos were taken at Cheesewring Quarry, so after it ended we carried on doing a bit of climbing, and Gaëlle finally managed to top out on a climb that has been her nemesis since the first time she came climbing with me.