Europe > France > French Alps > Chamonix > Mountains > Articles > Chamtastic

To be honest, Chamonix is a pain in the neck. That’s because if you want to see the summits of the stupendous mountains that surround the town, you have to crane your head back until your ears are almost touching your shoulders.

But this is hardly surprising when you consider that Mont Blanc rises 3,772 metres straight up above the Chamonx Valley. And Europe’s highest mountain is easily outdone in terms of sheer rugged beauty by the peaks that surround it, magnificent needle-like crags such as the 3,842-metre Aiguille du Midi and 3,754-metre Aiguille du Dru, draped in ice and snow year-round and awesomely yet menacingly beautiful as the setting sun turns them red, orange and ice blue of an evening.

As you admire the savage outline of these peaks over a pression or café au lait in one of Chamonix’s many cafes, it takes quite a feat of the imagination to believe people have climbed, skied, boarded and paraglided off pretty much every summit you see. For ‘Cham’ attracts extreme sportsmen and women the way a magnet attracts iron filings, and you can pretty much bet that as soon as one impossible challenge has been conquered someone will come along and do something even harder.

The town’s winter sports pedigree goes back over 200 years, to the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786 by local doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard and his partner Jacques Balmat (their statue is the centrepiece of the busy town square). Once this pair had been to the top of Europe, everyone else decided they wanted to follow in their frozen footsteps, with eccentric or plain crazy Brits leading the procession of individuals scrabbling up the mountains above Chamonix. Those with good sense and a well-honed survival instinct were guided by members of the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, the world’s oldest and most respected mountain guiding service. Those who thought they knew better often got to inspect the inside of a glacier in their final conscious moments.

The various peaks above the town succumbed to the attempts on their summits over the ensuing decades, and as the ‘Golden Age’ of mountaineering came to a close skiing started to take over from climbing as Chamonix’s main attraction – in winter at least – and the town hosted the first ever winter Olympics in 1924.

Things have moved on considerably since those days of tweed plus-fours and skis the length and weight of a small aircraft carrier, so that today high tech ski wear and ‘freeride’ skis and snowboards are de rigeur accessories for anyone promenading the winter streets and alleys of Chamonix and its smaller neighbour up the valley, Argentière.

Some of this kit even gets used from time to time, which for most skiers and boarders involves heading for one of the Chamonix Valley’s four main ski areas, spread out either side of valley in discrete and challenging little packages, and presenting slopes that are invariably pretty steep if not downright vertiginous. This is not the place to come and learn the art of sliding around on snow, but if you like a challenge then everyone from intermediate to the world’s best will find that Chamonix can test them to the limit and often beyond.

That may sound dramatic, so let’s put things in perspective – the bible of British skiers, the Good Skiing and Snowboarding Guide casually points out that to ski the formidable terrain between the pistes on the spectacular, glaciated Grand Montets ski area without a qualified guide ‘is to court death’. So you can’t say you didn’t know what you were getting yourself into as that avalanche swoops down on you – and rest assured, several skiers and boarders every year meet their maker in this fashion.

Having by now put the fear of God into you let me point out that not all of the skiing around Chamonix is a life or death affair. My own favourite area – and I speak as a skier who, wimpy as it may seem, has a tendency to avoid slopes that may kill me – is Le Tour, at the head of the Chamonix Valley, where I’ve had some of the most fun skiing of my life through sunny open bowls and trees on the slopes leading down towards the Swiss border and the town of Vallorcine.

For something a little more dramatic head to the Grand Montets ski area where you really can ‘court death’ on terrain that pretty much defines that much overused word ‘extreme’ – there are couloirs above the main ski area that people have ascended with ice axes and ropes before turning around and actually skiing back down them. A fall here, on slopes that may have an angle of 60 degrees or so, is quite likely to kill you (to put this in perspective the average black run has an angle of under 30 degrees).

But that’s for the nutters. Like most people, I prefer my falls to result in little more than snow packed into parts of the body where snow was never meant to go, and like most skiers on Grand Montets I stick to the steep pisted terrain or venture onto the powder either side of the main runs, or for more thrilling moments head down the exciting Point de Vue black run from the top of the Grand Montets cable car.

Then there’s the sunny Le Brévent/La Flégerè area on the opposite side of the valley where everyone from intermediate skiers upwards can have a fine time skiing with the massive domed bulk of Mont Blanc looming down on you whenever you look up.

And to top it all you can venture on to Chamonix’s piece de resistance, the 22-km descent of the Vallée Blanche. The ride to the start point in the Aiguille du Midi cable car, Europe’s highest at 3,842 metres, is an adventure in itself, but this is followed by a heart-in-mouth roped descent from the cable car station down a fearsomely steep ridge to the start point where you don your skis or board and head down the glacier amidst the kind of alpine scenery that adorns calendars and geography text books. This is do-able by any good intermediate skier with a good head for heights, although you’ll need a guide to avoid the crevasses, and you should be fit as the run is long and high, but in return you’ll get a mountain experience more Himalayan than Alpine.

If you have any energy left after a day amongst this rugged grandeur and testing slopes, Chamonix is a town that takes its partying as seriously as it’s mountain sports, with a fine selection of bars and restaurants, and clubs full of adrenalin-fuelled men and women who have travelled the world to be at the epicentre of alpine adventure.

Walking out into the streets of the town in the early morning after a drink or three you can look up and see the glaciers glimmering on the flanks of Mont Blanc in the moonlight and the twinkle of the Aiguille du Midi cable car station thousands of metres above, and literally feel the high mountain atmosphere flowing down into the valley on the cold alpine air. Stop to reflect for a moment as you stand surrounded by the biggest peaks in Europe and it’s quite easy to see why people have been drawn to Chamonix for over two centuries, for its landscape defines the word ‘extreme’ - and who doesn’t want a bit of that living-on-the-edge atmosphere to wash over them once in a while, however vicariously?

• More from Alf Alderson
• More on the same theme