Rope up and cross a crevasse field on foot
The crack is wide enough to swallow a car, and the guide tells you to step over it anyway. You're on the Vallée Blanche above Chamonix, roped between two strangers, crampons biting into ice that groans faintly underfoot. No one crosses this glacier alone — a guide checks the rope, the harness, the snow bridges you can't see the bottom of. He carries an ice axe he's used for twenty years; you carry one you've held for twenty minutes. The crossing takes hours of walking single file across white silence, past seracs the size of houses. What stays with you is the sound the rope makes when it goes suddenly, briefly taut.
Practical
- Cost
- $150–350 per person
- Best time
- Summer, when the glacier surface is most stable
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time it takes
- One full day, 6–8 hours on the glacier
- What people get wrong
- People assume the ice is uniformly solid and stray from the roped line, or turn up in trainers instead of proper mountain boots; guides supply the gear but not the fitness, so an unexpectedly long walk-in catches many off guard.
- With
- One other person