THE SIREN SONG OF MONTBLANC For centuries, climbers, philosophers and poets have proclaimed Mont Blanc a wellspring of enchantment. Now UTMB is spreading the message to runners. BY YITKA WINN The UTMB is a kaleidoscopic circumnavigation of the Mont Blanc massif, through France, Italy and Switzerland. PASCAL TOURNAIRE PASCAL 18 JANUARY_2016 TRAILRUNNERMAG.COM | | TRAILRUNNERMAG.COM JANUARY_2016 19 The week before I am to run Europe’s famed Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, several friends and I get to talking late one night with a grizzled Frenchman. self-described wine aficionado, the man has a brawny face, thick with the kind of sun- Aspackled wrinkles one earns from a lifetime working outdoors. His teeth are crooked and coated in a thin film of spittle. From a silver flask, he pours us shots of plum liquor and proceeds to tell us stories in rambling French— impervious to our lack of understanding. My friend Elodie, who speaks the language fluently, translates as much as she can for us between the man’s breathless, elated sentences. He’s explaining how years of drought are good CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: And they’re off in the 2015 edition of the UTMB; the eventual women’s champion, Nathalie Mauclair, is pictured in pink. Poles and for grapevines. The less water there is, the in Degraves’ truck began smoking. in one marvelous fell swoop? compression garments are commonplace. Industrial-strength cowbells provide encouragement and European ambience in the towns and along the course. deeper into the soil the roots must delve Within minutes, it burst into flames. “At this time, we had no idea what to find it. In this way, the rich textures Temperatures in the tunnel rapidly was organized in the United States,” says races that take place the same week. of the earth are better imparted to the soared to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Michel Poletti, one of the visionaries who As cultural historian Rebecca wine, drawn up from some otherwise Everything in the tunnel was incinerated, now serves as co-race director with his “Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, Solnit writes in her book, Wanderlust, unreachable depths. including 38 people trapped inside. It wife, Catherine. “We did not know about through the exertions of one’s body, step by step, “Pilgrimages make it possible to move “It is good for the plants to suffer,” Elodie took five days for the temperature to Western States. But we did know about physically, through the exertions of one’s translates. “The wine is richer that way.” cool enough for local rescue personnel to Grand Raid de la Réunion”—founded in toward those intangible spiritual goals that body, step by step, toward those intangible The man pauses to draw a breath, enter the tunnel, and three years before it 1989, a 162-kilometer race on a French spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard immersed in thought. Then he chuckles reopened to the public. island off the coast of Madagascar—“so are otherwise so hard to grasp.” to grasp. We are eternally perplexed and adds something. Elodie translates: The tragic fire also marked the demise we knew it was possible to organize such by how to move toward forgiveness or “Like the poets.” of a previously successful relay-style stage a race. It was just an adventure at that The Tibetans have a word for this summit; even renowned climbers like healing or truth, but we know how to Or ultrarunners, I think. race around Mont Blanc. Starting and point, just to try to do it.” kind of journey: kora, a meditative, Reinhold Messner have declined offers walk from here to there, however arduous finishing in Chamonix, the race passed They had no idea how long it might take circumambulatory journey in which from the Chinese government to make a the journey.” n a sense, the Ultra-Trail du Mont- through Italy and Switzerland on its for someone to run the 153-kilometer pilgrims are transformed by the entity first ascent.) Blanc, or UTMB—a 170ish-kilometer circuitous route through the Alps. Teams route they’d plotted out. Michel guessed (often a mountain, lake or place of In her memoir, Runner, five-time y boyfriend and I arrive in foot race that circumnavigates of seven could compete. For logistical 38 hours would make a reasonable cutoff. spiritual significance) they circle on UTMB winner Lizzy Hawker writes, “I Chamonix on a gloriously I Western Europe’s tallest peak, the reasons, the closure of the tunnel forced (After the first year, they extended it to foot. The pilgrimage can be further didn’t realize during that first race in 2005, sunny morning in early 15,771-foot Mont Blanc—is a phoenix suspension of the race. When the 46 hours and, to allow more time, shifted enhanced by “prostration”—the act of but for me this is what the Ultra-Trail du M August. Our friend Doug that rose from the ashes of disaster. organizers tried to resume it in 2002, the race’s start from Saturday morning to bowing or kneeling, and a term that Mont-Blanc embodies. It is a celebration, Mayer, a fellow Trail Runner contributor Just before 11 a.m. on March 24, 1999, only one team signed up, so they canceled Friday evening.) also means, according to Merriam a pilgrimage, a circumambulation—it who owns a trail-running tour company a Belgian truck driver named Gilbert it altogether. To their surprise, in 2003, more Webster, “complete physical or mental is a kora for those who choose. … A in the Alps, takes us on a sweltering Degraves left the French mountain That summer, a small group of than 700 people signed up for UTMB’s exhaustion; collapse.” pilgrimage is often associated with a jaunt up the vertical-kilometer course. hamlet of Chamonix with a truckload of friends and runners in Chamonix began inaugural running. For centuries, pilgrims have traveled physical journey, but it is also a search for It is a 2.3-mile route with 3,280 feet (one flour and margarine. Bound for the Italian wondering if there was a way not only to Tibet’s 21,788-foot Mount Kailash to moral or spiritual significance.” kilometer) of climbing. We hike out of town of Courmayeur on the other side of to revive the race, but also to improve it. or years, trekkers had already complete a loop around it on foot (see Perhaps it is this hope—of some kind the narrow valley on dizzying, zigzagging Mont Blanc, he entered the 11-kilometer Much of the course could be shifted from been coming to Chamonix to “Running in Circles,” October 2015, Issue of transformation at the flanks of a singletrack. When this gives way to tunnel that burrows through the belly of roads to trails. And, they wondered, what complete the circuit of trails 107). To do so is to honor the Tibetans’ mountain—that now draws 7,500 runners precarious rock ledges, we scramble the massif. if they challenged individuals—rather around Mont Blanc in an 8-to- belief that climbing the peak would be from more than 80 countries to Chamonix higher by clutching to metal cables and F TRAPPE MATT TRAPPE (ALL) MATT Deep inside the tunnel, the cargo than teams—to complete the entire loop, 10-day pilgrimage. sacrilege. (No one has ever stood on its each August for UTMB and the four sister ladders drilled into the mountain. 20 JANUARY_2016 TRAILRUNNERMAG.COM | | TRAILRUNNERMAG.COM JANUARY_2016 21 “The jagged aiguilles flank the blindingly white hump of Mont Blanc’s summit like sentries in dark veils ...” ABOVE: Mid-pack UTMB runners are treated to two sunrises. RIGHT: A cooling dip during the 2015 UTMB. Incredibly, we are not the only ones distant but directly beneath our toes, the beginning with the first year, 2003, “running” this trail today. glistening glaciers and their crystal-blue when terrible weather translated to only “A lot of people in Chamonix come run seracs opposite the valley from us, and 67 of the more than 700 starters making Forget Bend or Boulder or Flagstaff. If our sport this on their lunch breaks,” Doug tells us. the jagged aiguilles (translated, literally, the complete circumambulation of This makes more sense later, when I “needles”) that flank the blindingly Mont Blanc. Given that I can hardly has ever had a so-called “trail-running capital learn that most places in Chamonix shut white hump of Mont Blanc’s summit like hear Philippe speaking over the rain, down for two or three hours in the middle sentries in dark veils. Dozens of colorful it seems rhetorical to ask his thoughts of the world,” Chamonix is it. of the day. Lunch breaks tend to be a little paragliders drift soundlessly through the on why so many people tend to drop longer on this side of the pond. air around us. out midrace—typically about half the This year is different. Two days before comes strength … and from the strength And trail runners are everywhere. field—but I do anyway. the race, the fog lifts and the air sizzles arises pleasure.” Seeing someone decked out in trail- t is the last day we see the sun “I think the weather is a significant with heat. So dry and balmy is the weather I am a grapevine, I tell myself, willing running gear at the grocery store here— for a while. For the better part of factor, because it makes it so much forecast that the race organization sends to suffer in the name of richer wine. I am head-to-toe spandex, flanked with three weeks, a thick blanket of harder,” he says.