There are only few places and climbs in the Alps that have inspired me as much as the Monte Viso ridge in winter.
The locals call this mountain Re di Pietra –
– the King of Stone.
The story between Monviso and me is quite a long one.
The first time I heard about that mountain was about 11 years ago
and 10 years ago was the first time that I saw it.
Back then I was living in France, quite close to here.
One of my friends was a passionate fan of Patrick Berhault,
he told me about him and gave me one of his books.
In that book Patrick Berhault describes his traverse of the Alps
from Slovenia all the way to the coast in Nice, where he is from.
Towards the end of his traverse of the alps he came to Monviso,
I think it was the 135th day.
I had the feeling that it was something like his masterpiece
and that he was incredibly excited by it.
He describes it in his book as a journey between heaven and earth.
He wrote that when he came back down from the mountain,
he struggled with being back down in the valley again
because it was something truly special to him.
I consider Berhault an exceptional alpinist
and what he achieved almost seemed surreal to me.
There are multiple starting points for this Traversée Berhault.
Some people are starting at later stages
because the first part is not very technical,
but we were keen to do the entire traverse,
like Patrick Berhault did it.
Sure! It is always worth getting up early,
once you have gotten up.
Cheers!
We decided to start on the Italian side, Pian de la Regina is what the parking lot is called.
From there you are walking up to the Col del la Traversette.
After that you climb 9 three-thousanders on your way to the Monte Viso.
For me the Monte Viso has always been somewhat present
because my parents live a few valleys further south
so I drive past Turin quite often
and on a clear day you see Monte Viso stand out.
It is a mountain, that, I believe, everyone that is passionate about mountains, considers interesting and exciting.
And it is exactly like that for me.
It was Babsi's idea and in the past we were talking about how great it would be to do a project together in the alps
and then we were looking into where our interests overlapped.
David is an incredible endurance athlete and is very quick and skilled in combined terrain.
He is also really knowledgeable and crafty when it comes to gear,
always bringing the right type of gear,
so that he optimizes the weight of what he brings.
He just has an enormous amount of experience about that.
I love it when it gets a bit more technical, when I can climb mixed.
That worked really well!
Chamois!
Throughout the day it becomes more challenging,
you have to find the route and decide which towers do you want to climb to the top and which not.
Its still true that long ridges like that are some of the best training grounds
for me as a high-altitude mountaineer to prepare for my expeditions.
During those the days are also very long, I'm constantly moving,
constantly have to make progress and usually face challenging terrain.
The great thing about a ridge like that is that you don't have to deal with some of the hazards
such as objects falling down on you from above.
We made really fast progress and reached the goal for the day where we planned to bivouac,
a spot which we thought was quite good, the Passo due Dita.
It is a small col before the last three big climbs before the Monte Viso.
The last part was really dragging on, but yeah tired. Its always like that.
The absolute must have for bivy nights...
Great if you can still blow it up.
… a decent pillow.
Its beautiful isn't it?
On the second day we got up early in the morning, we couldn't see any stars and it started to snow lightly.
I just thought thats really not what we need right now and I was hoping that it would stop soon.
Over Turin it looked like it was brightening up again.
The climb up to Visolotto is described as a ridge climb
and then you are standing in front of a wall and ask yourself where exactly is this ridge?
Where are we going now? To the right?
Now we are following the ridge.
Route finding was quite tricky
so it was important to us to start climbing when there already was light.
What I love most about winter mountaineering is how creative it is.
It is always an adventure, even with a map and reading about the experience from other climbers,
you don't really know what it is going to be like until you are actually there and see the conditions.
And what I also like is that you can combine all the things you have learned
over the course of an alpinist's life to find the best solution to get through.
The climbing on the second day is generally more demanding and you have to get over all the key spots.
We were simul climbing and were climbing into the wall and then had to find our way back on the ridge.
It always ends up being more up and down than what you can see on the map.
There is just always another spot you need to abseil from and another tower you have to get up.
We took turns leading the way, sometimes Babsi was leading a section and then me again,
that worked really well.
Climbing in winter everything just becomes a bit more serious.
Its got a bit more of a calmer character to it.
Babsi told me pretty early on the second day after the bivouac night, that she thinks she got a bit of a cold.
The higher we got, the worse it became though,
and it became clear it's something more serious.
I told David right away, that I feel like something is off,
that I feel kind of ill and that I have to take it slow now.
A shit I think I caught a cold yesterday. What?
I think I caught a cold yesterday. Really?
I just felt a strong sting in the right bronchial tubes and that was at the summit of Visolotto.
And after that, my chest hurt while rappelling
and that was something I've never experienced before, not even with a cold.
After we were over the Visolotto,
it was already clear to us that the fastest and best way would be over the summit.
We had to choose a more difficult variant on Monte Viso.
There's a couloir on the left that you can otherwise walk up.
But it was completely blank, because there was really no precipitation, there was no snow it it.
I don't know if you like to get your Camelot back, you can still reach it.
And we then opted for a bit more difficult variant and climbed the red tower on the right.
And then it's really a bit tricky because on all the holds you have this one cm of fresh snow.
You try to hold on to it and it is totally slippery.
I noticed that I was feeling worse and worse, that I was getting slower and slower,
and that the pain was just getting worse.
But it still went alright.
What I always had in the back of my mind though was that we also had to come down from the mountain.
Well done!
What a journey.
It's really fucking long
So we don't have to go down there
*coughs*
Fuck, my lungs
On the second day David and I reached the summit of Monte Viso at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
At that time I was still feeling okay.
We managed the descent from Monte Viso without ropes relatively quickly.
After the tricky sections, however, my right lung collapsed.
The doctors said I probably had a pulmonary embolism
which was probably caused by a mild covid infection I had a month before.
Over the course of the evening and the night, heart problems came up as well.
On the last meters to the hut my boyfriend Bene, who was part of the film team, helped me.
His support was incredibly meaningful and important to me
and together we managed the situation quite well and made it through the night.
From a sporting point of view, David and I achieved exactly what we wanted.
When I look at it from a personal angle though, I find it a bit more difficult to define whether it was a success or not.
Because with this quite threatening disease that I was facing, it was of course not what I had imagined.
It was also not the end of the climb that I was picturing.
But I also think that stories don't have to be defined by their endings.
What matters to me is far too broad to be constraint in advance,
for example to reach a certain peak in a certain time frame.
The moments that I will remember can be those spectacular ones that you imagined beforehand,
but they can also be the quiet ones, the ordinary ones that you encounter almost unnoticed along the way.
For example, the feeling of cold rock under your bare hands,
the feeling of moving with trust and ease in the mountains.
The prospect of soon being able to fall into someone's arms.
And especially the feeling of taking the first steps at dawn towards a dream that has accompanied you for 10 years.
But above all, the importance for me lies in what Patrick Berhault describes at the end of his book
as the great motivation of his traverse of the Alps.
And that is solidarity, friendship and the joy of life.