When I left Chamonix in 2019 a few days before my 28th birthday I had no idea where my life was headed. I wrote of feeling like my heart had been smashed into tiny pieces and that I kept leaving different parts in different places with different people.
Returning to Chamonix 7 years later was surreal. In the intervening years this place has been firmly stuck in my psyche. The place that both made me and broke me. I have walked the streets of the centre-ville as a way to distract my brain and drift off to sleep. I’ve told endless stories of my time in the mountains, from fast packing the TMB in 2015, to racing the CCC in 2018, to skiing some of the classic lines in 2019.
Everything was almost as I remembered, with just a few changes highlighting the fallibility of memory. I could navigate my way to the train station or the supermarket like a homing pigeon. I wasn’t sure how I knew what I knew but I knew it was the right way to go.
I expected to find this familiarly comforting. Part of the motivation for coming back on this trip was having local knowledge to make the trip planning and adventures easier. But at first, I found it unsettling. It felt like I might just bump in to a younger version of myself around one of the blind corners in the Sud. The thought then lingered, if I walked in to a younger version of myself. What would I do? What could I do?
But I didn’t find a portal to the past. Nor a way to see the future. I didn’t find the piece of myself that I left behind. I didn’t find peace. I just found the same old inanimate cobbles, rocks, and peaks, reliably indifferent to my existence.
The receding glaciers were able to snap me out of the introspective time warp. My first time off the Midi and down to the Mer de Glace was eye opening. The crumbling moraine walls tower above what is left of the lower ice. There was a new gondola, twice the size, installed to get tourists up and down to the quickly melting ice cave, wrapped in white plastic sheets to reflect the worst of the sun, and probably 70 vertical meters of steps leading from the end of the ice to the gondola. The familiar placards on the way up these steps reminding me that in 2018 when I arrived to live in Chamonix the glacier would have been at the top of those stairs. It’s hard to know for how long, La Vallée Blanche, possibly the most famous glacier ski run in the world, will actually be tenable. Certainly, Pas de Chèrve, one of the classic lines I was lucky enough to ski in 2019, did not look even remotely on.
The other changes I found were more personal. My approach to skiing when I lived in Chamonix previously was different. I was objective focused. I liked to list the things I had done and the goals achieved. Satisfyingly, I saw a lot of progress in my ski touring from barely being able to kick turn to learning to use crampons and ice axes, how to navigate glaciers safely, how to ski all kinds of snow including powder and except crust. Being able to safely get up and down the mountain or Col was the aim. How it happened was secondary. I also skied with much more experienced and skilled skiers and mountaineers who made a lot of the tough decisions and had an absolute gift for finding good snow.
These days I try to be more experience focused. I have skied a lot more and know the joy of finding good snow on a good angle whether is a named feature or not. I also have more exposure to and experience in consequential terrain. And on this trip, I was the one who was familiar with the area. I was the one calling the shots.
The storms that came in while we were in Cham brought significant wind and then the spring got warm and dry quickly. I found myself in the familiar conundrum of starting at maps, reading weather and avalanche forecasts, and trying to divine some decent snow. Sunny aspects were more reliable but timing the thaw was tricky and skiing refrozen chunder to get to them was miserable. Shady aspects were a total gamble from wind affected nastiness to cold and dry “grippy” snow.
Many of the lines in Chamonix you access from the top. Due to the number of people out and about rarely do you want to be going up what people are coming down. But it is also a lot harder to know what conditions are like standing at the top of something than having ascended the descent route.
With these unknowns I struggled to back myself and my decision making. I wasn’t sure where my limits were in relation to the choices available. I didn’t want to over commit but just repeating the more accessible tours I had done previously had lost some appeal. I also wasn’t just concerned my own experience. Finding the right level of challenge felt like a much greater challenge than it had previously. I agonised over every decision.
But despite all my whining. We did some great skiing. I know once I am sitting on my couch in Luggate if you offered me a lap over Col du Passon in the distinctly average snow conditions we skied it in. I would take it. Expectation is the thief of joy, every single time. I also just had a lot of fun laughing with old friends, waking up in the mountains every day, and lapping lifts.
Since returning, I have been reflecting on the trap of obsessive optimisation. I think my little engineer brain can get carried away trying to selected the “right” answer, to minimise discomfort and maximise enjoyment. When I left Cham in 2019 I wrote about learning how type 1 fun could actually be quite fun. That I had pushed myself so hard and so far in the type 2 fun direction I completely ran out of gas. That I had lost sight of the sun. To crawl out of the hole I put myself in I pulled back from constantly going after the hard thing.
But now I realise the pendulum might have swung too far in the other direction. Constantly trying to optimise every adventure to minimise the bad and maximise the good is exhausting in its own right. To achieve something meaningful some level of discomfort/risk/struggle is always going to be required – it’s often just picking your poison.
Sometimes you just have to get to the top of a line make a gut feel call. Sometimes that results in you skiing heinous refrozen chop with your tail between your legs and tears steaming up your goggles. But sometimes you find knee deep untracked powder on a consistent 37 degree angle and you can’t understand how you got so lucky.
I realised (again) that it’s not so much the preventing suffering but it’s preventing suffering for the wrong reasons. My aim for the future trips is not hyper-fixate on the difficulties of any given option. I want to select objectives by what I want to experience rather than what I don’t want to experience.
I want to take the chances that arise and to not stress so much about the best option. I want to push a little bit harder, to find the limit, but to do it because I want to grow as a person not because the outcome defines who I am or what I am worth.
I may not have found that missing piece of myself in Chamonix. But something I didn’t know I was missing, a little spark. Something to keep me warm this winter.