Gervasutti Pillar-07-23-05

The Gervasutti Pillar on Mont Blanc du Tacul, seen from the Panoramic cablecar.

Here I am on one of the early pitches. There were some people batmanning up some fixed ropes, they descended when they reached the end of the fixed stuff. I'm not sure what their game was. Perhaps the ropes were for people to climb in the pre-dawn darkness.

Saturday I did a very long climb with a fellow I found through a partners wanted book at the Office de Haute Montagne. It was called the Gervasutti Pillar. We stayed at a hut and got going at 3 a.m. (most people get going at 1 a.m.!) Then we had a few routefinding problems, which led to delays, and we weren't speed demons anyway. The top of the route was snowy and icy, which made it a different sort of challenge, that of just getting up in reasonable time. After the end of the pillar per se, there was a sequence of other challenges just to get over to the summit of Mont Blanc de Tacul and the easy descent. Bits of 5th class climbing sprinkled in with lots of scrambling. Anyway, it got dark and we still had one last tower to climb. But wouldn't you know it, my partner (Duncan) dropped or lost his headlamp. So I would lead up a small section, then belay him over while shining the light on it. It was rather eerie, climbing a tower in the dark with no clear picture of where the route went or what the mountain was like away from the beam of my headlamp. On one side it appeared to be a blank face leading down hundreds of feet, beyond the reach of the headlamp, in any case.

At this point we had been going for 20 hours and we were getting really tired. There was a French team which had passed us during the day, but we had more or less kept up with them, partly by choosing better and less time consuming alternatives on the way up. At one point there was another tower to climb, and it looked pretty hard, and since I knew we were going to run out of daylight. The French team weren't sure where to go, but after reading my copy of the route description, I assured them it was the right way. I got Duncan to follow that pitch with a belay from the French leader. (Everyone here climbs with a double 9 mm rope, so it is easy to belay two seconds at the same time.)

Later, we could see the headlamps of the French pair on top of the last tower, but it looked so far away. The wind was coming up and we weren't dressed terribly warmly. Duncan was getting really cold and was really focused on getting off and not having to bivy. Of course he didn't make things easy in that regard by dropping his headlamp! Not that I was terribly enthusiastic about bivying, but I didn't want to do something crazy or unsafe just to get off that night. Duncan thought we could rap down to a gully and climb out of that to the easy ground, thus avoiding the final tower. This proved to be correct, but I was very nervous about rapelling into the dark to terrain only vaguely visible by headlamp from a distance. I rapped down very slowly, with Duncan getting impatient, firstly I had to determine if the ropes reached a safe spot, and then to get an idea of the terrain, whether we could move around safely, how icy it was, etc. I found a stance under an overhang which was somewhat protected from the wind, and at this point I was thinking we'd spend the night, because climbing the gully in the dark didn't seem too great an idea. I started to just get occupied with some task and spreading it out in time (like stacking a rope with lots of tangles) just as a way of passing the time. You don't get so cold as long as you are occupied with something.

By now it was after midnight, so it was just a matter of a few hours until dawn. In fact people start their climbs at 1 a.m., so there was some comfort in the fact that being out on the mountain at that time isn't so bad. Duncan was getting concerned that he might get hypothermia, and eventually I decided the gully didn't look so bad. So I headed up it, and thankfully it was not too bad, and did lead to an easy way to the summit and the easy descent. We got back to the hut at 4 a.m. and just crashed, after more than 24 hours of climbing.

Here's another trip report, from a party that had a similarly epic time.

This photo was taken on a pitch at mid-height on the pillar. The verbal description from the Rebuffat book was helpful because it wasn't always clear where we were on the topo. Also, there are some options, like avoiding A1 cracks with 5.8 climbing, that were worth knowing about.

This photo was taken high on the route, on the icy ramp where the route exits the spine to the right. We did one more pitch on the spine than the French party, because they were having trouble with snow-covered slabby climbing.

The views were superb, here is a shot of the Grandes Jorasses.