Alps Trip 2025

This year’s AMC alpine meet kicked off with Justin and Rich’s sweltering drives to Chamonix, where they met a blistered but excited Lucy fresh from the JCMT. 

With a weather window too good to wait for the others, they headed for the Albert Premier Hut while Lucy hung back to drag Adam, Luke, Ethan and Lucas out to Chamonix for Fête de la Musique, from where Lucas wandered on to a mystical forest rave. 

Sunday started very high for some and very low for others. Rich and Justin woke up to a bivvy sunrise and cruised through Arête de la Table, while Ethan and Adam collected themselves and acclimatised by sport climbing on the Brévent before catching a late lift up to join.

The trip was just getting started. Lucas and friends slogged across the Argentière glacier to take on Mort de Rire and Southeast Spur, while Luke tackled the Tyrolean on the Clocher-Clochestons Traverse. Over in the Écrins, Josh and Becca narrowly avoided being taken out by a serac fall on Dôme de Neige. 

At the bivvy, Ethan and Adam psyched up for the monster route that had dominated conversations all week: Forbes Arête. After a selective reading of the highly conflicting weather reports, they headed out into a clear morning to reach the base of the route.

Just as we were all starting to wonder how it was going, a terse message arrived from Adam: “We can’t find the ab point”.

Rich helpfully sent over a screenshot of the topo, to which Adam pointed out a key issue:

They were in a complete whiteout. They tackled the arête with 3m of visibility, managed to locate the ab and painstakingly descended. 15 hours after starting out, the zombified pair traipsed back to the hut — stopped occasionally by a knee-deep step into a bergschrund — and prayed that Lucy had changed her mind about coming up that evening.

Suckers.

They met a buzzing Lucy back at the hut, where Adam managed to negotiate a generous lie in of 3am the next morning before literally stumbling from the sofa to the dinner table and into bed.

Ethan headed back to camp whilst Adam and Lucy stormed through Arête de la Table in bluebird conditions, appreciating the route so much that they left an axe there to enjoy it forever. Meanwhile, Justin and Rich made for the border and marvelled at Switzerland’s majestic wildlife on the Perrons Route.

On Wednesday, Becca and Josh made their way over to Courmayeur from the Écrins for a date with the Dent du Géant. With even Adam’s tick-collecting urges temporarily placated (and his legs 90% lactic acid), the rest of the club spent the day by the pool in Chamonix’s leisure centre or valley climbing in Vallorcine before grabbing pizza in Argentiere.

For the grand finale Ethan, Lucy, Adam, Justin and Rich set off for the Italian side on Friday to take on the Dent du Géant with some helpful beta from Becca and Josh. Despite missing the crucial Courmayeur/Aosta turning, Adam defied the laws of physics (and roads) by flooring it back and some begging in Itanglish secured us a late lift up. We set up camp on the Glacier du Géant beside a glacial pool and fell asleep listening to Rich and Justin's beautiful musings about feet.

Two days earlier Lucy and Ethan had declared the iconic Hotel California sport route overrated, commenting: “it’s not very up.”

Be careful what you wish for. The Dent du Géant was very, very up. We left the tents at 3:45am and trudged up steep snow and loose rock for 2 hours, reaching the first pitch just as a breathtaking sunrise broke through giving us a panoramic view of the massif.

The route consisted a little too heavily of fixed ropes for our liking. But the slabs were spectacular, the Madonna saved us a kiss and French guides demonstrated innovative new ways of using a Micro Traxion. Everyone returned victorious to the Torino hut by 3:30pm, where we sampled the Mediterranean diet by splitting a gigantic Babybel.

After a week of hard climbing and great company, we were all very sorry to say goodbye to the Alps - that is, until some hungry alpinists return in two weeks to conquer the Matterhorn…