Chocolate, tennis, sex: there are some things the French do very well (on this last subject, I presume). But one thing the French don’t do very well, or even attempt to do at all, is to form orderly lines. Max and I were stuck in a mob of a 100-plus skiers, pushing toward the entrance to the Aiguille du Midi telepherique. The weather still wasn’t cooperating, and with only a couple of days left, we had lowered our sights to doing a short mixed line on the Mount Blanc du Tacul. Stevie Haston, the infamous British climber who is one of the fathers of the modern mixed-climbing revolution, had put up a couple of hard dry-tooling lines on the Tacul back in the early 1990s. We targeted Scotch on the Rocks, a seven-pitch line, as an objective we could sneak up in a day.  

I threw a quick elbow to some guy in a neon one-piece ski suit, calmly dropped my skis across his companion’s knees, and Max and I darted onto the first tram of the day. Twenty minutes later and 9,000 feet higher, we were lost in a razor skyline as far from city life as you could imagine. The serrated blade of the Auguilles stood to our left, while to the right loomed the blunt backdrop of Mount Blanc. Straight ahead on the Italian frontier, the hulking maul of the Grand Jorasses lurked in a drifting cloud.