RUNNING THROUGH TIME
From Le Buet to the Col de la Terrace is a climb of nearly 5,000ft. I had run it’s entirerity in thick clag - the widely spaced switch backs in the forest eventually giving way to a path that reminded me of the scottish highlands, this in turn leading to steeper ground on the final rise to the col. The cloud was thinning and sensing blue skies beyond, I turned for the summit to the south. Here, a broad ridge gives way to a narrow neck and beyond, a small, airy perch that marks the top of Pointe de la Terrace. It was one that I had missed on my last run here, a summit I had thought almost not worth bothering with. How wrong I had been. A knife edge ridge stretched beneath as cloud billowed below, only Mont Blanc visible far beyond. And so the scene was set for what was perhaps the best day’s running I have had yet in the Alps.
Traversing the plutonian landscape below enroute for Le Cheval Blanc, the mist rising and breaking all around, I felt a peculiar sense of moving through time. Only beneath the vast sea cliffs of Scotland’s north coast and among the Hebrides have I felt this same sense of creation, as though looking upon a landscape not yet fully formed. Running through geological layers of time I pressed on, another big climb loomed beyond. And then finally I was above the cloud, range after range of mountains falling away, the Mont Blanc massif stretched for mile upon mile, raised above a white sea of infinite depth.
I doubled back on the ridge for another summit previously missed, Pointe du Génévrier, before returning to the col and starting up the north ridge of Mont Buet. Cables make easy work of the climb, though the ridge itself appears strikingly loose, blocks stacked in uneasy balance, held by layers of crumbling shale.
I passed the summit and dropped a short distance toward the steep descent that would follow, but could not bring myself to leave that place. I sat for an age, committing the scene to memory, for these days come only rarely. Perhaps a handful for a lifetime among the hills. Let that be enough, for such a thing is to be prized, the sense of it treasured, protected as time passes, to be recalled when it is needed most so that we might be satisfied our time was well spent.
