Clockwise, from the top left: Swiss mountain guide Patrick Weiss looks at a map at the Cabane de Mont Fort, a mountain hut 2,457 metres above the Swiss ski resort of Verbier, on April 17. Ski tourers relax at the Dix hut, on April 18. Higher up, on skis now, en route towards the summit of Mont Buet, French Alps, on April 26. Issa, a Samoyed and one of several resident dogs at the Dix hut, on April 18.Illustration by Photo illustration by The Globe
More from this series • A journalist returns to the mountains after a near-death ski experience
On a Wednesday evening at the end of last winter I found myself on the terrace at the Dix hut, a refuge perched at almost 3,000 metres in the Swiss Alps. The hut sits on an outcrop above a vast natural amphitheatre, below a roughly 1,000-m wall of schist and hanging glaciers.
That night the hut was rammed; this was April, the high season for the Haute Route, the trail that is the most celebrated ski mountaineering itinerary in the world. In the boot room, baskets were stuffed with climbing harnesses and the ice axe rack was bulging. There was also a tension about the place. The sky was clear, but bad weather was forecast to arrive the following day. It was unclear precisely when the storm would come.
Moments of tension like this are not infrequent in ski mountaineering, but for me they had a special resonance, since I had nearly lost my life in an accident on a ski mountaineering expedition in Russia in 2017. I decided to challenge myself with an Alpine ski journey to overcome what held me back. Now I found myself on the last stretch and facing yet another fork in the road.
From the hut, there are two possible onward trails. The first picks its way up glacial terraces to the summit of a mountain called the Pigne d’Arolla at 3,796 m, before descending to a hut called the Cabane des Vignettes. That route is magnificent, but it is high and exposed. The alternative itinerary creeps out of the cirque over a lower col, heads down toward the village of Arolla, and up a more sheltered glacier to the Vignettes hut. The second route involves about the same amount of climb, but is lower and safer in bad weather.
The decision we, and the other parties at Dix hut, faced was whether to take the high or the low road. The situation also mirrored what happened here five years ago. In April, 2018, with another storm inbound, a guided group headed from the Dix over the Pigne d’Arolla. They became disoriented in a blizzard, and spent a terrible night less than 550 m from the Vignettes hut. By morning six skiers were dead; a seventh expired in hospital.
Tourers leave their skis at the bottom of Mont Blanc de Cheilon, a 3,827-metre summit, and head toward La Ruinette, in Switzerland.Simon Akam/The Globe and Mail
I stepped outside into a different April night, this one in 2023, keen to escape the close atmosphere inside the hut. There is scant mobile phone signal at the Dix, but a small patch of WiFi spills onto the terrace. Various individuals had come outside to profit from a purloined connection. A British guide – I think – looked up from his phone. Two skiers had been killed in an avalanche on Mont Blanc, he said, crushed by a falling serac, a block of glacial ice. My first thought was, even more?
My ski-mountaineering goal: To overcome fear and dependency
Some months later I found a Swiss study from 2016 that suggested a calculation of nine “micromorts” (one in a million risk of death) for each day backcountry skiing. That was six times higher than the risk of a day on snowshoes, and likewise is higher than skydiving (eight micromorts per jump). However, it is still a 13th of the risk of giving birth, and much less than the toll of BASE jumping (430 micromorts per jump). That seemed to figure. People did die all the time ski touring in the alps, but a lot of people were also going ski touring.
The responsibility game and the swoop
The overall objective of this months-long project was participation in the Patrouille des Glaciers, a biannual race in Switzerland between Zermatt and Verbier that involves 57.5 horizontal kilometres and more than 4,000 m of vertical climb. I will be taking part in the next iteration of the PDG – which is the most famous ski mountaineering race in the world – in April, 2024. But, as the end of last winter approached, I had two particular goals in mind. Firstly I wanted to ski the Haute Route, the classic Chamonix-Zermatt tour, with a guided party. Secondly, I wanted to go ski touring without guides, to put into practice the competencies I had learned.
I tried both those things last April. It was a rich experience but in the background rumbled a series of accidents, 11 ski touring deaths in under two weeks. For a while the cavalcade of tragedy seemed constant and that made me think hard about what I was doing. I tried to quantify the hazards and I became fascinated by the way these risks were weighed by various stakeholders; I called this the responsibility game.
At the same time, in those final weeks of last winter, I also experienced a sense of having successfully entered another world, in manner sporting, linguistic and cultural. Via intense training, I had reached a point where I could – largely in the company of German-speaking Swiss, but with French, Italians and Germans also in close proximity – cross winter landscapes that would be otherwise impassable, with speed and efficiency. I privately term this “the swoop.” By last April the responsibility game and the swoop were moving in tandem.
Deaths in the mountains are not news
On Easter Saturday of 2023, I was in Worb, the village outside Berne where I was then living when I was not in the mountains. I was training at a mountaineering school called Bergpunkt, which was run by a man named Michael Wicky. Anita, his wife, told me there had been an avalanche in the Mont Blanc massif. There had been another incident too on Alphubel, a 4,206-m peak in the Swiss Valais.
Ski tourers relax at the Dix hut, on April 18.Simon Akam/The Globe and Mail
We were sitting together in their orderly Swiss kitchen, a place of clean surfaces and shiny utensils. It seemed distant, down on the plain. Yet we could watch the avalanches; there was film of both. I found clips on Twitter from France, up toward the Glacier d’Armancette. There was the great powder trail of the snowslide, starting on the icefields, soon rising above the forest. In there, six people were dying, including two French mountain guides.
The film from Alphubel was superficially less spectacular. It seemed as though the mountain shrugged – wrinkle lines appearing in distant white. But this slide still caught nine skiers. All were rescued. There were injuries, but this time no deaths.
I felt profoundly strange; the contrast between the quiet village and the events in the high mountains was intense. I knew enough to see the holes in the press coverage. There was no avalanche warning, the international stories said. That was wrong; the avalanche warning scale is a ladder from one to five, not a binary on-off. It was level two, which is indeed relatively low. The shock was compounded as the party on the Armancette was led by professionals.
I was struck too, looking at the news, that this was really not news. Ski tourers die in avalanches every winter in the Alps. Online I found some details of these extinguished lives, the youngest victims in their 20s. But largely it was not treated as a big deal. I could think of few other human endeavours where six deaths would be reported so casually.
The High Way
The night before my Haute Route began I stayed with an old English friend in Le Tour, the highest village in the Chamonix valley. We were eating when her partner mentioned three Italians had just died in another avalanche.
This latest incident took place on the Italian-French border. All of the victims were trainee mountain guides. One was a champion ski mountaineering racer. I tried to imagine the horrors that lay behind the bald description in the press. Then, the next day, I went skiing again, because that is what you do.
I was with a different outfit this time, Hohenfieber, literally “high fever.” We did not start in the Chamonix valley; new snow had coated the Mont Blanc massif and after two fatal accidents inside a week, the trip organizers were jumpy. We would start in Verbier instead, part-way along the route.
I was annoyed, but I knew the reasons for this decision, and that annoyance was also tempered by past experience. This was not my first Haute Route. I’d skied the trail in 2006 when I was at university, with the Austrian Alpine Club. We’d completed the first leg then, over the Mont Blanc massif, though we had to come down later in a storm, before returning to cover the last section to Zermatt. So I knew what we would have done; I began to imagine the Haute Route and I as a sandwich of experiences, 17 years apart.
Snow accumulated to a great height behind the Vignettes hut, on April 20.Simon Akam/The Globe and Mail
We spent the first night at a hut above Verbier and the next morning I made my earliest start of the entire winter – breakfast at 4 a.m., on skis by 5. It was high spring now. The snow would turn soft earlier in the day, and we had a long way to go. Well before dawn we were skinning up the last of the resort’s pistes as our headlamps cast pools of light on the snow. At daybreak we were on our first col.
As chance would have it, this group proved the most capable of the whole winter – four men and one woman, all in their 30s, all fit and competent skiers. The result was a group that could move fast and elegantly over varied terrain and long distances. We could, in the vernacular I was developing, achieve the swoop. I found chameleon-like joy in passing as one of these people, when I came from outside their culture, their mountains and their languages.
It is around 19 horizontal kilometres and some 1,800 m of vertical climb from the edge of the Verbier resort to the Dix hut. I’d travelled this stage in the other direction earlier in the winter, and I found it a surreal experience to invert a ski tour. Long climbs one way became short descents the other. By sun-up we were on the plateau below the peak of Rosablanche, the sky pink behind us. We left skis on the shoulder below the summit, strapped on crampons and roped up to stomp to the top.
We descended on foot to the ski depot, clicked back into our bindings and sped swiftly down a glacier in powder then up over another col, and on toward a frozen artificial lake. It was hot now; these slopes faced east and were avalanche-prone. We drove on hard to get through the hazard quickly. By the southern end of the lake we were exhausted but there remained another roughly 600 m to climb.
I ran out of water. On a scorching stretch – with the hut still refusing to appear – my body cried out for fluids. I ate snow; others did too. At last our weary caravan arrived.
On my first visit to the Dix this winter, I’d found it a polyglot idyll, but something was different now.
It was full of English speakers, glutted with Brits and Americans. This felt like commercial mountaineering writ large, a function of male midlife crises, the unskilled being dragged over terrain beyond their mastery. An American group initiated a Mexican wave one night. The hut’s resident Samoyed dog retreated to the terrace as though distraught at the Anglophone interlopers. I was not sure if this change was in me or the surroundings, or both, but something felt different to all the other tours I had done this winter.
The next day we climbed Mont Blanc de Cheilon, a peak whose north face towers over the Dix Hut. Again we moved fast, on skis at 8 a.m. When we roped up, we changed from six single skiers to a 12-legged organism, the rope a flexible spinal cord.
The route zig-zagged through ice cliffs, weaving between huge crevasses, until we came to a pile of rocks at 3,827 m that formed the so-called winter summit, the one accessible on skis.
Skiers head out buy torchlight in the early hours of the morning on April 18 for the long route from the Cabane de Mont Fort to the Dix hut.Simon Akam/The Globe and Mail
Oh, the descent. There was the compression of time – up in four hours, down much of the way in 15 minutes. There was the swoop again, the guide’s instruction to stay in his tracks and his shouting at me when I was lured by untracked snow and trespassed out of the line he wanted us to stay in.
With the speed and the powder – and the competence I had acquired to negotiate both – the descent seemed to match the ultimate human experiences, transcendental religious, spiritual, narcotic or sexual moments. It seemed very worth it.
Then that evening, in the spilt WiFi on the terrace, came that news that those other two ski tourers had died on Mont Blanc. Eleven dead now, inside two weeks. It was all harder to justify.
And now here was the looming storm and the decision between the high road and the low. The ghosts of 2018.
Racing the weather
We went high. We had proved to our guide that we could move quickly and efficiently. He emphasized that we needed to be swiftly out of the hut to beat the storm. Duly, by 7 a.m. we were on our skis, the sky still clear.
We headed up toward the the first col. The bad weather hit at around the same point it struck the 2018 party. We were in sunlight at 10:30 a.m., but as we strapped our crampons on for a steeper step, cloud descended. Soon we, too, were in zero visibility on the high glacial plateaux. But the guide navigated without incident, and we made the summit. We descended, mercifully unroped. We were at the Vignettes hut four hours and 15 minutes after we’d set off from the Dix, well before most other parties, including those who took the low road. We passed the site where the 2018 group spent their ghastly night out. It was astonishing just how near to the hut that was.
That afternoon, the storm rattled the cabin. The next morning did not improve, more snow and wind, so we went down to Arolla. There was no route on to Zermatt for us. I was disappointed but I had skied that final section in 2006. I knew the long stretch up over three cols, the route under the Matterhorn, the final descent. In two trips, I told myself, I had skied the component parts of the Haute Route. Just not in one take.
Unguided
I was done with professionally led tours. But there was one more thing to do. I travelled to France, staying in an old schoolhouse outside Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval.
Conditions were ideal for my first real independent ski mountaineering venture. I teamed up with a couple of friends for a larger independent objective, Mont Buet, the highest peak between Sixt and Chamonix. It is not glaciated but more than 3,000 m, a proper mountain. The avalanche warning sat at two out of five, the lowest that can usually be expected; there was fresh snow, and visibility was better than the forecast had suggested. The peak was untracked and so it was all on us: We made the decisions, we picked the route. I asked for distance between us in certain places, so that if there was a slide we would not all get caught. It was thrilling. By 1 p.m. we reached an automated weather station on the ridge below the main summit. One of my companions suggested we turn back, saying that we didn’t want to be in the valley below in the heat of the afternoon. I argued most of the snow was already gone from the slopes that menaced the route down there. We pushed on.
Swiss mountain guide Patrick Weiss looks at a map at the Cabane de Mont Fort, a mountain hut at 2,457 metres above the Swiss ski resort of Verbier, on April 17.Simon Akam/The Globe and Mail
Thirty minutes later, the summit. It was cold here, still firmly winter. Then came the swoop – unguided version – picking our lines down to the end of the snow in another 30 swift minutes. Now it was back into springtime, walking out where the stream gushed with meltwater.
It was a substantial day – Strava claimed we had climbed almost 2,000 m. There was banter on WhatsApp afterward and the easy companionship permitted by shared endeavour, even though I had only just met my two fellow skiers.
I later indulged in the obligatory retrospective Google accidentology, and there it was, a photo of Mont Buet with the whole south face ripped out by an avalanche in 2015 and a skier’s death in 2014. But that was another day, another mountain under different snow. Not today, Buet.
I flew back to London a few days later. In June, I began in earnest the physical training for the race next year. I hired as a coach Yannick Ecoeur, a retired member of the Swiss national ski mountaineering team who won the Patrouille des Glaciers in 2010 and set a record time in the process. Every week my training plan appeared from him in curt French. It was intense – often six, sometimes seven sessions a week. Flat London is notably short on topography, but Ecoeur and I made it work. I ran on Hackney Marshes and by the Regent’s Canal. I biked out on great loops into the Essex Countryside as the summer crops turned golden. I did circuit training among the bemused spectators in the park near my flat.
Now, in November, it seems only a few minutes ago that I left the Alps, but I am about to return. This winter I will be in France, conducting a solid period of unguided ski mountaineering, and doing several prep races before the PDG in April. At the moment this experience, which I once so wanted to do, seems stripped of romance, a gruelling treadmill I am locked on for another six months. I am nervous about doing more ski touring without guides. But still, I am using the outer world to leaven my inner landscape, and that’s what I wanted to achieve when I set out on this journey.
Simon Akam is a British journalist and author. His first book, The Changing of the Guard – The British Army since 9/11, published in 2021, was a Times Literary Supplement book of the year and won the Templer First Book Prize. Simon can be found at @simonakam on Twitter, @simon.akam on Instagram.