By Patrick Wheeler
There’s a corner on the road into Chamonix, just past Les Houches, where the valley finally opens and the Mont Blanc massif rises up in front of you all at once. I relax the instant we round it. Ten years of arrivals and it still happens; my shoulders drop, my breath slows, something in me settles. We don’t live there. But turning that corner feels like coming home.
Hillary and I found the place on our honeymoon in January 2017. We’d gone to ski, and somewhere in that first trip the valley got its hooks in us and never let go. We’ve been back one or two times a year most years since. In 2019 Hillary and her family walked the full Tour du Mont Blanc, guided and supported, and came home glowing. In 2022 she ran the OCC while I ran the ETC; the next year we both ran the ETC. This summer was our tenth visit (I think?), and strangely, our first in a full calendar year, since this past winter pulled us to Cortina and Milan for the Olympics instead. A year is a long time to be away from a place that feels like home. When we finally rolled back into town, the owner of Moody Coffee who welcomes us like locals each time we return. That’s Chamonix. You leave, and the mountains and the people are still there holding your spot. And there really aren’t mountains anywhere we’ve traveled quite like the western Alps.
So let me be honest about what this article is. It’s part trip report and part love letter; to the valley, to the people who live and move through it, to a whole culture that treats the mountains as something to be revered and the act of moving through them as a kind of daily grace. But it also had a purpose. This winter I’m entering the lottery for the CCC, the 102-kilometer race that runs from Courmayeur, over the mountains, and back to Chamonix: roughly 64 miles and 19,000 feet of climbing. Before I put my name in for something that serious, I wanted to know the ground. Not the elevation profile on a screen. The real trail, under my own feet. So we spent five days fast-packing the course: running where we could, power-hiking the climbs, sleeping in mountain huts and villages along the way. A preview. A reconnaissance. And, it turned out, some of the best training I could ask for, landing right in the heart of my build for the Vermont 100K a few weeks from now.
The route
The CCC traces the northern section of the Tour du Mont Blanc, stitching together three countries. We broke it into five days:
– **Day 1 — Courmayeur to Rifugio Bonatti.** 13 miles, 5,700 feet. A steep climb straight out of town, and then the trail opens onto the Italian Val Ferret balcony; a long, flowing traverse with the granite and glaciers of the Grandes Jorasses filling the sky across the valley.
– **Day 2 — Bonatti to La Fouly.** 12 miles, 3,000 feet. Down to the valley floor, then the long, steady climb to the Grand Col Ferret at 8,300 feet, the border between Italy and Switzerland, and down the far side into the quiet of La Fouly.
– **Day 3 — La Fouly to Champex-Lac.** 9 miles, 1,900 feet. The gentle day. Swiss villages, pine forest, wooden chalets, and a short final pull up to the lake.
– **Day 4 — Champex to Vallorcine.** 17 miles, 5,800 feet. The queen stage. Two long and unrelenting climbs (and corresponding descents).
– **Day 5 — Vallorcine to Chamonix.** 11.5 miles, 3,500 feet. Home, along the Grand Balcon Sud with the whole Mont Blanc chain laid out across the valley.
The beauty
The Italian side is still the most beautiful stretch of trail I know. From Courmayeur to La Fouly the path clings to a balcony high above the Val Ferret, and the Grandes Jorasses stand across from you the whole way, sheer and glaciered and almost too big to hold in your eye. You round a bend, and there they are again, and it never stops working on you. The scale and beauty doesn’t feel real.
Our night at Rifugio Bonatti was its own small perfect thing. You come in off the trail tired in the good way, sit down to a long communal dinner with strangers who won’t be strangers by morning, and go to bed early because the mountains have taken everything you had. There’s no wifi to speak of, nowhere to be, nothing to do but eat and talk and sleep and get up and run again. Yet unlike the huts in the Whites, Refugio’s in the Alps balance ruggedness and dignity in way not easily achieved. There isn’t WiFi, but they do have hot showers (limited to 90 seconds each via a token system), hot espresso, and delicious Orangina that is becoming harder and harder to find back home in the States.
The valley gave us its wildlife, too. Marmots everywhere, whistling their alarm and vanishing into the rocks as we came through (except one who was quite interested in Hillary and almost booped her toes!). On the first big climb on the first day we came on a Chamois and her brand-new calf, close enough to watch for a while before we continued the climb still ahead out of Courmayeur. It was a welcomed break from a climb tipping over 40% grade! There was still a little snow high up in places, including enough on the north side of the Grand Col Ferret that we glissaded down on our backsides, laughing, a little colder, entirely happy.
And then there are the people, which is the part I didn’t expect to love as much as I do. On the TMB you leapfrog the same faces for days; you pass them on a climb, they pass you on the descent, you find them again at the next hut. We fell in with an American family backpacking the full loop, out to celebrate their son’s recent graduation from the Naval Academy. His sister is at Annapolis too, and he’s about to begin flight training to become a pilot, so this was likely their last long trip together for a good while. The whole route had been his idea. Every time we crossed paths the welcome got warmer, and by the end it felt less like running into strangers and more like checking in on friends. That’s the thing about these mountains, everyone here has chosen to be moving through them, and it makes for very good company.
The hard part
The queen stage earned its name. You leave Champex and climb up and over the Bovine, cross the Col de la Forclaz, and drop down into Trient, and that’s only the first half. From Trient we took the CCC route, which splits off from the standard TMB there, up over Les Tseppes: brutally steep, and one of the few long stretches without water. Two big climbs in a single day, the harder one saved for when your legs are already gone. That’s the kind of thing you can’t learn from a profile chart. You have to stand at the bottom of the second climb with tired legs and start walking up anyway. And if the climb doesn’t hurt, the technical descent on the other side certainly will.
What I came home with
The weather was perfect the whole week. Everyone felt strong. And I got the answer I’d come for: I can do this. The CCC will be hard, I have no illusions about that, but after five days on the course I know it’s within reach. That’s a different kind of confidence than staring at a start list and hoping. It’s the quiet certainty of having covered the ground.
So the lottery entry goes in this winter, and I’ll spend the months between now and then hoping my name comes up. There’s a 100K in Vermont with my name on it already. And whatever the lottery decides, we’ll be back in Chamonix before long. We always are. We round that corner past Les Houches, the whole massif rises up to meet us, and I feel my shoulders drop, and I’m home.
