Winter is coming

On Friday I woke up to steady rain and a cloud ceiling so low that it enveloped the ski lift chalet. "It's a good day to sleep another six hours," I thought. Although I hadn't planned on meeting Beat at the final PTL life base in Petit St. Bernard, I worried that he wouldn't have enough dry clothing for the weather, which was forecast to feature this and worse for three days. Also, they'd been so happy about the sandwiches I made yesterday that it seemed crucial to bring more. So I packed up every piece of warm clothing in the house and headed through the tunnel once more. 

Courmayeur markets itself as the "sunny side" of Mont Blanc. As someone who only visits in September, I've been a skeptic, but incredibly I emerged from the 11-kilometer tunnel to blazingly bright skies and temperatures that were 10 to 15 degrees warmer than Chamonix. In all of my visits to this region, I've never been to Petit St. Bernard, which sits on the French-Italian border. Driving up from Courmayeur brought back a little PTL PTSD, as I wound through all of the dark, narrow, and long tunnels that I sprinted through when I was lost and severely addled during 2013's PTL. It's a long story. I haven't been back up here since, but it continues to be an unsettling reminder of my capacity for bad decisions.

 Col du Petit St. Bernard is an incredible place, though, worth climbing through the bad memories. Topping out at 2,200 meters, the pass features a six-story stone hospice, or hostel, looming directly over the road. According to Internet sources, this hospice was founded in 1049 (!) and was built on top of ruins from Roman temple to Jupiter. The hospice became famous for its use of St. Bernard dogs in rescue operations. (And I always believed the caricature of a St. Bernard with a little barrel of brandy strapped to its neck was a Swiss thing.) The original building was destroyed during World War II, and rebuilt only recently.

Beat and Pieter were fairly close according to the tracker, and based on a difficult-to-decipher map on my phone, I wandered up a route where I'd believed they'd come in. Of course I was completely wrong. But it was a happy mistake, taking me back over the border into sunny Italy, while thick clouds billowed along the ridge in France.

I climbed to a point at 2,700 meters that was directly on the border. At first I wondered if I could loop back to the hostel, but the French side was a mean place of cliffs and talus and no direct line that I could discern. So I turned around.

Ah well. Things are just better in Italy, you know?


Although I was a bit late getting back, I did catch up with Beat and Pieter. I wanted to post this photo because its a typical scene in the race — fumbling with first aid supplies in the drop bag room. It smells terribly of wet shoes because it's right next to the room with the shoe dryer, and the contents of bags have been disgorged everywhere until it's almost certain you'll leave something important behind. Good fun, you know?

The guys told me they wanted to sleep for three hours, which gave me exactly enough time to buy them sandwiches at the bar up the road and climb another mountain, if I hurried. Lancebranlette is just shy of 3,000 meters high, also standing right on the border. It's an intimidatingly sheer cliff when viewed from the Italian side, but the French side offers a friendly grassy slope that only demands you climb 2,500 feet in two miles. Easy peasy. I decided to hike before visiting the bar, which closed at 6 p.m., so I only had two hours to do it. Since descending is the slow part for me, I had to make it to the top in an hour or less. Could I do it? I could try!

My main obstacle was this little ibex, who galloped toward me as I trudged up the trail. She stood facing me near a switchback with a steep drop-off at the curve, and I wondered if this might be one of those cases of territorial maneuvering, like that mountain goat in Washington who bucked a man off a cliff. I admit to slowing my already sedate pace to "sneak" past her.

Well, I suppose she looked friendly enough.

On the summit ridge, the brisk breeze accelerated to become a shocking wind. The temperature at the hostel was 5C — likely close to freezing here, and the wind was gusting 25-30mph. I wasn't quite prepared for the intense windchill, and scrambled to pull on a fleece buff and mittens.

The summit of Lancebranlette. It took me 1:04 to reach the top. If I was less prone to vertigo, I could have taken a photo looking down these cliffs and hundreds of feet of sheer drop-off. This was as close to the edge as I could manage before my hands began to tremble and I felt light-headed.

A little lower on the ridge, I managed to peak around a ledge for a view of Mont Blanc.

Looking down at Ancien Hospice du Petit Saint-Bernard. Incredible location. 

As Beat and Pieter prepared to leave, I tried to sell them as much warm clothing as I could. Beat rejected the puffy jacket but did take the fleece buff that I wore on Lancebranlette. "At least put on some tights," I complained. "It feels like Alaska out there, no exaggeration. There's this frigid wind, and it's getting stronger. It's really, really, cold." This suggestion was rejected as well. I suppose you find your rhythms and stick with what worked before, but damn. I'd been sitting outside for 40 minutes and was wearing three layers of coats and two hats.

With that, Beat and Pieter headed off into the sunset, facing another long and cold night on high, crumbling ridges.

Saturday morning in Chamonix was just as rainy as Friday, and quite a bit colder. I decided to get my steps in by climbing Mont Joly and cheering for Beat and Pieter at the top. It was a bland, gray march through fog and drizzling rain. The briefest sucker hole opened shortly after I reached the ridge. This bolstered my mood. I was certain the storm was clearing, as the forecast had predicted would happen sometime Saturday afternoon.

Instead, the clouds moved back in, bringing more intense winter wind and horizontal snow flurries. I was climbing with the wind at my back and didn't even realize how bad it was, but rime clung to grass and rocks, and ice crystals formed on mittens that were wet from scrambling. Rime ice forms when vapor from fog freezes to surfaces; I remember reading somewhere that it has to be at least as cold as -5C for this to happen. I wouldn't doubt that the temperature was a number of degrees below freezing, before windchill. I was quite wet from the sweaty climb and rain, so the down coat that I brought for the purpose of waiting did little to block the chill. It only took two minutes to feel frozen to the core. By the time I decided it was madness to wait for Beat up here, I felt desperately cold.

The Italian PTL team who took my summit photo were flabbergasted that a hiker had come up here of her own free will.

"She says okay for us because we are in the race, we must," the man translated his partner's objections. "For you, ahhh, stupid."

Of course the descent was directly into the wind, with wet mittens and shoes. Within minutes my hands and feet were deeply chilled blocks of meat. To top it off, the fog had become so thick that everything more than five feet away was an opaque sheet of gray. I found it difficult to stick to the ridge. I kept dropping much too far to the left — better than the right, which was a sheer cliff. The wind and fog made everything seem dangerously intense, so when I was even a little bit "lost," I had to fight the urge to panic. Both hands and feet were entirely numb. I probably should have put the down coat back on, but it seemed better to keep it dry in case I rolled my ankle and needed to crawl downhill.

As I crab-walked on my ice-block appendages down the final scrambly section to a ski lift, I was passed by two teenagers wearing shorts, cotton hoodies, and skate shoes. I hadn't seen them on the way up and couldn't discern where they came from, but they were making impressive haste downhill.

After a few thousand feet of descent, the epic nature of the ridge was almost forgotten. It was only mildly drizzling again, my mittens and hat were off, my coat unzipped, and I was creeping down 30-percent grades on my heels while eating crackers from a little box. In the evening I finally got together with friends for dinner and a semi-fancy French restaurant (I had the Tartiflette. Not as good as Mormon funeral potatoes, honestly.) It was good timing to head over to the finish and watch mid-pack UTMB runners sprint under the arch amid the occasional lumbering PTL team. Beat and Pieter finished just before 1 a.m. Sunday, after a reroute took them around the final high pass (for which I was extremely grateful, given its technical nature and the icy conditions.) They were the 20th team out of 61 finishers and 100-something starters. Of course, because of the reroute, there was a shake-up of rankings near the end. That's one of the reasons PTL doesn't rank finishers. It's not a race. It's a "little trot."

Beat almost sounded annoyed when he heard there was more than a 50-percent finisher rate this year. "PTL is getting too easy," he said.

I'm proud of Beat for surviving this thing yet again, although I can sense it really may be time to move on. On Sunday I wanted to get in one last good climb in Chamonix before we left, possibly for a long while. Time was limited so I returned to La Jonction, the glacier viewpoint that we climbed nine days earlier.

This day had the best weather of the week — clear skies and cool temperatures, in the high 40s when I left in the late morning. It was incredible to see these dramatic mountains dusted with new snow.

The time limit compelled me to stop at the saddle, about 300 meters below the overlook. Conditions above did not look great, though, with wet snow and ice for the mild scrambling in this section. I debated whether I would have gone for it if I had the time, I decided that I probably would have.

In trying to climb at least 5,000 feet every day, this was the only day I failed — with 4,900 feet. My nine days in Chamonix were no PTL, but I did log 98 miles with 50,503 feet of climbing — a decent effort requiring four to nine hours of hiking each day. It's funny, because as soon as I finally started to sleep through the night, I didn't feel tired at all. There was perhaps some drag to my legs, but for the most part I improved each day. For example, on this final day I snagged the Strava women's course record for "Chemin du Glacier Climb." Hey, it's a stout segment, 2,386 feet in 2.5 miles. I felt good.

In the back of my mind I'm already in training again, for the 2018 Iditarod Trail Invitational. My hope is to walk the 350 miles to McGrath one more time, to re-up my ever-aging experience levels and ponder whether I have what it takes for what I consider the ultimate challenge (and isn't there always another ultimate challenge?) — walking the Southern Route to Nome. Of course I could change my mind about all of it and return to the bike or move on completely. But I relish the idea of the thousand-mile sled-drag. There is something deeply primal and satisfying about travel on foot — entirely dependent on your body for every inch of forward motion, naturally ponderous, and a fantastic vehicle for reflection.

The fact I'm thinking about it at all, however, is a sign that I really do feel renewed confidence. People I haven't seen in a year tell me I "look" better than I did last year, which of course always spurs the silent reaction "what the hell does that mean? I looked like crap last year?" But I feel better. I'm excited. This time, I hope to make it stick.

After all, winter is coming. 

Getting my steps in

On Tuesday morning I checked the race tracker and saw that Beat's team was just about to the top of a narrow pass called Fenêtre d'Arpette. After that, I remembered, was a long technical section requiring helmets and crampons — obviously featuring a whole lot of nope. But if you avoid the scary route and instead turn left toward the bucolic Swiss village of Champex Lac, you can make a nice loop following the super-easy UTMB course over a 2,500-foot bump called Bovine mountain. It was one of the few segments of UTMB I haven't seen, and Fenêtre d'Arpette looked spectacular. I thought the loop would take me eight hours, which is all I can afford on a Tuesday before 12 hours of working through the night on Alaska time.

It was already becoming hot when I left Trient around 9 a.m. — 27C according to the car thermometer. I'd only packed two liters of water, and was feeling severe drag in my legs as I trudged up a lovely trail along a turquoise glacier stream. This would be day four of steep hiking, logging at least a vertical mile of climbing every day. "I should do this every day I'm in Chamonix," I thought. "Vertical mile." The 5,280 feet of a mile sounded hard, so I rounded the number down to 5,000 feet. Like people who get their 10,000 steps in every day, I would strive for 5,000 vertical feet, every day for nine days. The challenge was on. 

Trient Glacier and its impressive moraine. Sunlight was glaring in the late morning, and I had to squint through my sunglasses. Even with washed-out light, the scenery was spectacular. 

The final 2,000 feet to the pass jut upward on on a talus and boulder slope with a faint trail that sometimes approached 50-percent grades. My legs finally began to perk up and I relished the grind. This is exactly my kind of thing ... steep, only mildly technical, not dangerous. I passed a few PTL teams who appeared surprisingly cheerful given the circumstances — after all, they'd been working hard, really hard, for more than 24 hours. The most bubbly were three Japanese women who I was thrilled to see. Mixed teams are becoming more common in PTL, but all-women teams are still exceedingly rare.

Looking down the other side of "the window of Arpette." It had taken me four hours to cover six miles, and I had to decide whether I could manage 12 more miles that included an equally difficult descent and another robust climb in the same amount of time. I decided to go for it.

Unfortunately I lost the route and burned up many minutes crab-walking and crawling through a large boulder field. I've learned that I have poor ankle stability ... yes, I realize that I can work on strengthening my ankles. But even then, I'll never be a graceful gazelle dancing through the boulder fields. No, I imagine that my skewed proprioception will always require three- and four- and five-point contact until I resemble a slug oozing over the rocks.

Looking toward Aiguille d'Arpette. This was the scary route PTL was supposed to take, somewhere up in those cliffs. I later learned that the whole field had been rerouted around the high glacier traverse, apparently because the PTL organization had a change of heart and decided it was genuinely too dangerous for 250-plus sleep-deprived participants with widely varying skill levels. I was shocked.

Predictably, I ran out of water while making my way down the valley. There were cows everywhere, and I felt uneasy about collecting water from a stream and putting chlorine tablets in it. "I'll be able to get water in Champex," I thought. But then the route skirted through the forest above town, and I didn't come across any fountains or even streams until I reached a small restaurant at the base of Bovine. There was an outdoor bar, where I pointed to a cold case with 1.5-liter bottles of water inside. "Can I buy one of those water bottles?" I asked. Although the bartender appeared to understand English, my request was foreign to her. She tried to serve me a tiny glass of sparkling water with no ice for 3.20 Swiss francs. I insisted that I needed "more water," pulled the bladder out of my pack, pointed to the sink and asked if I could buy tap water, and finally succeeded in purchasing a bottle of sparkling water for 8 Swiss francs. The whole exchange was so perturbing that I almost walked away, but was glad I didn't, as it was over 90 degrees and there were no streams at all most of the way up Bovine. I'm pretty much a fish when it comes to drinking water, and it flabbergasts me how Europeans get by with their 25 centiliters of lukewarm bottled water, here and there. This is always one thing I miss most about the U.S. — free and abundant water everywhere.

Anyway, I wrapped up that hike in closer to nine hours ... and 7,300 feet of climbing. I worked through the night until 6:30 a.m., and just after I'd finally succumbed to blissful sleep, I got a call from Daniel. Some family issues had come up that forced him to drop out of the race, while Beat and Pieter went on as a two-man team. He rescheduled his flight out of Geneva to the following morning. After a couple of hours of logistics-wrangling with him, I figured I had about four hours to spare before I needed to pick Daniel up in downtown Chamonix. Could I squeeze in 5,000 feet? Sure I could try!

I picked what I think of as the Skyline route between Flégère and Planpraz stations. I've hiked this route before in the other direction, and had largely forgotten how hard it is. After scrambling directly up a talus slope to avoid construction vehicles on the cat-track road to l'Index, experiencing a big scare from tumbling rocks thrown by a trail crew on a switchback above me near Glière Chapel, and climbing a whole lot more than I expected to Col de la Glière, my time buffer had unravelled completely.

Follow the yellow dots. Just a touch of exposure, but I'd already burned up my adrenaline ten minutes earlier, when I was startled by loud, falling rocks that sounded like they were directly above my skull. I was so frightened that I screamed from below at the trail crew, who just laughed and said "is okay! is okay!" Dudes, just because you can see me doesn't me I can see you or know what you're doing. It's not okay.

At Col Cornu, I could see the storm moving in over Mont Blanc. The hot, sunny weather was predicted to deteriorate into three days of rain, wind, and snow down to 2,000 meters or lower.

These sheep were exceedingly cute. As they approached, the lead one let out a polite "ba-a-a," so I stepped off the trail. They continued on the trail, and the last one also ba-a-a'ed as she passed. "Tell me you don't have a mean dog with you," I said. (I have been aggressively confronted by Alpine sheep dogs in the past.) But they were alone, just out for a Wednesday stroll through the rocks.

After Daniel left Wednesday morning, I drove through the Mont Blanc tunnel to catch up with Beat in Morgex, Italy. Morgex is about the halfway point of the route, with dinner served in an old chapel, and sleep on wrestling mats (no blankets) in a gym. It had rained through the night, and they arrived here wet and cold. The sun came out ever-so-briefly while they were resting, only to have to skies open up with more rain just after they left.

Even still, they looked good, despite the sleep deprivation. The previous evening they were caught in a thunderstorm on a high ridge, with lightning and thunder booms following within three seconds. This was only the beginning of the epic weather for them.

It was after 4 p.m. by the time Beat and Pieter left Morgex, and skies did not look as friendly as they had earlier in the afternoon. I still decided to go for my 5,000 feet on the trail to Testa Licony, where there apparently is a vertical 2K race (meaning 2,000 meters of climbing.) I didn't know about this race beforehand, but began to see markers designating every 100 meters of gain (D+100, D+200, etc.) Hundred-meter markers are somewhat demoralizing, because it takes three times as long to climb 100 meters as it does 100 feet, and yet tired minds process the numbers in the same way. Soon, though, the signs surpassed four digits, and I rose above tree line to see that I really had gained some height.

On grassy slopes the trail became more faint, and at one point I merged onto a goat trail. By the time I realized my mistake, I looked at my GPS to see I'd already gained 300 feet since leaving the trail, and a paralleling switchback was 700 feet higher. The route itself veered way off to the left — for good reason, I later realized. Instead of backtracking I made the always-questionable choice to crawl directly up the slope, which of course became steeper as I climbed. Steep grassy slopes are slippery, and a fall could easily send a person careening downhill the way they would on snow. To top things off, it was sprinkling rain again, which made the grass even more greasy.

The slope tilted nearly vertical, and I found myself death-gripping clumps of grass and regretting every decision I'd ever made. I definitely didn't want to go down the way I'd came, but the higher terrain just continued to become worse. GPS showed only 200 or so feet remaining, and I started to see rocky outcroppings blocking my path. I continued gripping grass strands and side-stepping diagonally until I reached a rib of rocks that looked climbable. It was a narrow spine, and steeper than the slope. But there I found real handholds, which I appreciated. I was so, so ecstatic when I put my hands on the trail and hoisted myself onto solid ground. Never again. You'd think I was trying to mimic the PTL experience or something.

Behind me, a darker storm approached. A winter-like wind blasted down from the ridge. Its chill was distressing, and invigorating at the same time. I'd given myself an absolute turnaround time to get back to treeline and safer trail before sunset, but I was so buzzed after surviving the grass scramble that I continued marching upward long after the deadline passed. Still, I really didn't want to be caught up here on steep grassy slopes and faint trails when it was both dark and pouring rain.

So I settled for a saddle, about 150 meters below Testa Licony, with shrouded views into the Villair valley. I was feeling a bit woozy from not eating or drinking in several hours, and also from the 5,600 feet of climbing I had on my legs just today. But the highest priority was skedaddling downhill to the trees before dark came.

I made it just in time, strapped on my headlamp, took a several big sips of water, ate a Snickers Bar, and accelerated to a knee-thrusting jog. Hard rain needled through the tree canopy, causing me to slip and skid as I reminded myself to lean forward. The forested part of the trail was even steeper than the alpine zone, and now the trail was rippled with roots and carpeted in wet pine needles. I fell on my butt, jamming my pinky finger painfully, but quickly bounced up and ran faster.

I wasn't really in a hurry; it was already dark, and I knew I'd end up back in Chamonix to cook myself a dinner of pasta with red sauce and tuna sometime around midnight. I'd only slept about four hours in the past 60, after days of jet lag and insomnia before that, and the edges around my vision were beginning to blur. My adrenaline was spent, my legs were wobbly, and I had no business running down a muddy 30-percent grade. But I felt joyful. Positively joyful. Why? Perhaps because of all of that. The sharp edge of life is where we live most vividly, where joy and fear ebb and flow with increasingly intensity, and where memories retain their luminosity four, ten, possibly even 20 or 40 years later. More frequently than I care to admit, I think about PTL. I hated PTL. But it stuck with me.

I thought about Beat marching into this rain and wind toward another high pass, again feeling both nervous and envious. What would stop me from marching through the night? The image of my pale white fingers clinging to strands of grass on the near-vertical slope returned, and I shuddered with fear. I suppose I really did want to leave this mountain behind.

"Knees high, pick up your feet," I chanted. The lower-altitude forest grew thick and high, blocking out all light beyond a pale yellow circle thrown by the headlamp. Here the world was small, and yet just as slippery and difficult as it had ever been. Still, the smallness made it more manageable somehow, and there was a steady cadence to every uneven step. My mind settled into the rhythm and slipped into a fantasy where I wasn't afraid of the mountain anymore, and just flowed with it, as naturally as water. 

PTL, again

Well, I managed to distract myself sufficiently for a week-plus in Chamonix to avoid writing a blog post. I have so many photos I want to archive, so I suppose I'll start. We returned to the European Capital of Extreme Sports for Beat's sixth and what he promised would be his last Petite Trotte à Léon.

The PTL is a lot of things, but I think it's best described as "290 kilometers of nonsense." It's a high-mountain loop around Mont Blanc on a route that changes every year, following paths that are always steep, routinely rough, and not infrequently nonexistent. The route includes a rather boggling 27 kilometers of vertical gain (so 87,000 feet in 180 miles), but I'm of the opinion the numbers don't mean much. Climbing can be relaxingly easy on a steep dirt path gaining 1,500 feet per mile (which I enjoyed many times during the week.) In PTL, technical features, exposure and route-finding dominate the challenge, and often necessitate a pace amounting to less than two kilometers an hour. So 152 hours to finish this race is actually not a lot of time (and the cutoff was 136 hours in 2013 when I attempted it and timed out, which I emphasize because damn it, those 16 extra hours really would have helped.)

In short, PTL is treacherous and often dangerous terrain combined with sleep deprivation and relentless forward motion regardless of weather or conditions. It's utter nonsense, but some people thrive on nonsense. I can certainly relate.

For years after 2013 I begged Beat not to return to PTL, but by 2016 my defenses had worn down, and by this year I felt the hint, just the tiniest little hint, of FOMO. It's misplaced. Beat's proven himself capable while I continue to fall on my face and roll my ankle on relatively buffed out Colorado trails (which of course are still rocky and steep.) It's difficult to discern why I prioritize my wanderings in places where I so frequently falter. I'm like that kid at the piano recital, the one who's been practicing for years and still stabs at the keys while out-of-sync staccato notes echo through the room. "Shame, she just doesn't have an ear for music," people say about that kid. I'm that kid, with mountain running. I think about this often and wish I'd stuck with piano.

Anyway, Beat was preparing for another PTL and I was both jealous and relieved that it wasn't me. My plan as usual was to loosely follow the race, offer the minimal support where allowed, work occasionally, maybe see a friend or two during the always hugely well-attended UTMB week, and fill the rest of the time with overwhelmingly beautiful hiking. Eating and sleeping, bah ... there's always time for that later.


For our first full day in Chamonix, Beat and one of his PTL partners, Pieter, insisted on joining me for a climb to the junction of two glaciers, Bossons and Taconnaz. We rented a small chalet that was literally underneath the top of a ski jump platform, and the trailhead began 0.10 miles from the front door. It shoots immediately upward and gains 6,000 feet in five miles, which is not a small feat less than two days before a race like PTL. Clearly I am not the only one suffering from ridiculous FOMO. But it is almost impossible to pass up these views:

Looking toward Aiguille du Midi over Bossons glacier.

The Taconnaz glacier. At the tip you can see the remnants of a massive calving event that we witnessed. It sounded like a loud thunder clap, and recently arriving from Colorado, I immediately looked up at the sky. Far below the fluffy clouds, a building-sized chunk of ice peeled off the tongue of the glacier and tumbled down the rocks like an avalanche.

"You're not scrambling underneath these glaciers during PTL this year, are you?" I asked Beat.

"I don't think so," he answered, sounding uncertain.


On Sunday I made a quick trip from the chalet to Brevent, another place where you can knock out a cool vertical mile in five horizontal ones, and if you don't feel like walking down, you just buy a ticket for the cable car.


Views of Bossons and Taconnaz glaciers from the opposite side of the valley. La Jonction is the top of the round ridge in the center. Brevent stands at a similar altitude in the Aiguilles Rouges (Red Mountains.)


I still can't travel anywhere in these vast mountains without looking into a distance and reliving moments from my 2013 PTL experience. I've written about the experience in this blog, but only in fairly superficial detail. The intensity of it still haunts me, in mostly not good ways. Still, there were intensely good moments too — walking under those cliffs when they were bathed in silver moonlight, gazing up at sheer walls and wondering what possible path could lead beyond them. As it turned out, there usually was no possible path — only steep couloirs choked with boulders, and sheer astonishment that a race organization as professional as UTMB would admit participants with no provable mountain experience and send them up an indiscernible mess of rubble that was clearly going to end in a death tumble. Well.

Monday morning was the start of the 2017 edition of PTL. This year Beat started with his original teammate and Colorado friend, Daniel, and Pieter, a Belgian who he met at Tor des Geants in 2014, and has raced PTL with every year since.

Daniel grew up climbing Colorado 14'ers and is a gazelle in boulder fields, and Pieter has mountaineering experience and youthful enthusiasm, so they were a good team. Beat was an experienced trail runner but more or less a mountain novice when he started PTL in 2012. Now he's such an entrenched veteran that the mountain guides who design the PTL greet him with hugs and cheers. He tells me that he, too, used to be bothered by exposed terrain, but now he's tired and doesn't care much anymore.

After the racers jogged briefly through the streets of Chamonix and launched directly up a ski lift slope that's dubbed "the vertical kilometer," I headed out to the base of a mountain they expected to hit later in the day, Mont Buet.

Mont Buet is a 3,096-meter peak (10,100 feet) in the Red Mountains. While researching a route from the valley, I learned it's commonly referred to as "Mont Blanc for the Ladies" ... clearly by chauvinistic French men. I was a bit happy to see this characterization, though. That means Mont Buet is easy, right? I mean, it's 6,000 feet of climbing in six miles, but easy, right?



It was pretty easy — just one long boulder field to negotiate midway through the route. I was scrambling through the boulders when rain began to pelt my face, which made me grumpy. Usually I don't mind rain, but I do when there is unknown and potentially difficult (i.e. slippery) terrain ahead. It turned out to be no big deal, but spiked my stress levels enough to keep me on edge for the rest of the day.

On the way to the summit, I leap-frogged with a nice Italian couple who were fast but made frequent stops, while I trundled along at my steady turtle pace. Occasionally a hole in the clouds would let through sunlight, and the man would point and say, "look, it is sunny!"

"Na, that's just a sucker hole," I'd reply.

"What is sucker hole?"

"Oh, it's, well, a small opening in clouds that tricks you into believing it will stop raining."

"But it will still rain," the man replied knowingly.

Despite the rain and the long approach, there were still eight or nine people on the summit. Except for me and one other, they were not ladies, and Mont Buet was decidedly more gray and gravelly than Mont Blanc. But it was still a beautiful place to be. One guy offered to take my photo. I like that he didn't zoom in at all, so I'm just a drab little person in a big mountain backdrop.

I thought I might see the first PTL teams on my way down, but I didn't having a working GPS track for this section, and didn't have a clue where they'd come from. It could be from anywhere. Literally anywhere. PTL could require a tightrope walk across a ravine, and I wouldn't be surprised.

I made a short detour to climb above Col de Salenton because I was sure they'd walk through here, but nope. They came in from behind this mountain, somehow. So I saw no one. I trundled the long, long descent to the village of Buet and still didn't encounter any PTL teams. In the village, I lingered for a while at the Skiroc chalet, where PTL participants would be served their one daily meal that I later learned was a soup of half-cooked onions in broth. It had been more than nine hours and this was barely mile 26. Nine hours is an almost unfathomable time for the fastest team in a marathon, but PTL is not a normal race. Really, it's a sadomasochistic ritual with fleeting moments of euphoria and drawn-out hours of fear and pain. Still, I suppose I can understand why Beat claims he's not going to return every year, and goes back anyway.