Adventure Magazine

Our bivvy site, under Envers des Aiguille, where constant rockfall disturbed our sleep. "This is always a disconcerting sight for a climber. It was especially alarming because we watched the debris peter down towards a gully where we’d been planning to venture in the coming days." This is always a disconcerting sight for a climber. It was especially alarming because we watched the debris peter down towards a gully where we’d been planning to venture in the coming days. The gully was the access to 375m-long alpine climb called Sala Athee, on the peak known as The Monk, which was recommended to us because of its technical crack climbing. We were sitting in an idyllic bivvy spot below the granite needles of Envers des Aiguilles, near Chamonix, in the heart of the European Alps. The rockfall wasn’t anywhere near us, but witnessing such a large one always focuses the mind on what might fall down at any moment. All through the night, the unnerving sound of collapsing rocks echoed around us. If I happened to be awake, there was little to do but hide in my sleeping bag and hope we weren’t in the direct path of anything. The following day, as we scaled the jagged corners and technical slabs of a 650m-high climb called Banana Republic, we remained on constant alert to the possibility of rockfall, which, thankfully, never eventuated. We had chosen the climb because it had less objective danger than other routes in the Mont Blanc massif. The European summer had been a sweltering affair, and many of the glaciers in the alps were already opening up. In early July we had crossed the Valle Blanche to climb the magnificent granite tower, Grand Capucin, and were later told that a guide and his client had both fallen into a crevasse, breaking several bones, while crossing the same glacier at around the same time as we had. A week before that, a serac the size of two football fields collapsed from the top of the Marmolada Glacier, in the Italian Dolomites, killing 10 people. It’s still unclear how it happened, but it wasn’t an area known to be dangerous, nor was it a hanging glacier, where icefall would be expected. But rising temperatures have made glaciers more unstable; leading up to the accident, a weather station at 3250m on the Marmolada had recorded 23 straight days of temperatures above 0 0 Celsius. These are uncertain times, as rising temperatures change the face of the mountains we love to play in. Over the last century, temperatures in the European Alps have gone up by 2 degrees Celsius, twice the global average. Climate change has contributed to glaciers shrinking by more than a third over the last 18 years. And while scientists expect the Marmolada to disappear altogether within 15 years, others predict all glaciers in Europe below 3500m will have gone by 2050. The same pattern has been observed in New Zealand, which in general means the snowline is creeping higher while the volume of ice shrinks. Studies from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research show that a third of the permanent snow and ice in the Southern Alps was lost between 1977 and 2014. More recently, New Zealand glaciers have been shown to have lost 1.5m a year from 2015 to 2019, almost seven times as much compared to the thinning that occurred between 2000 and 2004. As a globe-trotting dirtbag climber for more than a decade, this poses a dilemma: how to offset the carbon footprint of someone who regularly undertakes long-haul flights and super-long drives. Some feel so guilty about their impact on the planet that they no longer indulge in visits to far-flung climbing destinations. 8//WHERE ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS/#235

A massive rockfall tumbles down the south face of Aiguille Verte, where another hot summer continues to change the mountains we play in