Here you can see my pictures about our tour in September 2003 on Mere de Glace (France). We were only two: Dani and me, so on my picture you'll mainly see Dani. If you want to see pictures of me as well, you can also take a look at Dani's site (after clicking the link, open the files named "merdeglace" - those are the pictures about this tour).

Here our walk starts: at Montenvers. We took the cable-car from Chamonix (1000 m) that took us in a few minutes to Montevers (1900 m). At Montevers you have some restaurants and a look-out with an excellent view at the glacier Mer de Glace (see in the picture below, behind Dani's back). Mer de Glace is the longest Glacier of France. It comes down all the way from Mont Blanc to Chamonix.

After some 10 minutes of walk down-hill, we reached the "wall". The "wall" that looms some hundreds of meter high on both sides of the glacier. We climbed down several ladders (see in the picture on the right) to reach the surface of the glacier that we were supposed to walk along, all the way up to Mont Blanc du Tacul (4248 m)

...but on our first day only a few kilometers.

Next day we woke up rather comfortable, packed out tent (above) and started to walk around 10am. The plan was to get as close to Mont Blanc du Tacul as possible, at a place from where we could climb the peak next morning.

First we had to get to the cottage (again up some ladders) from which we reached the glacier again, but at a much higher altitude.

... but first we could admire from the glacier how the morning sun starts to shine into the valley of Mer de Glace, with the bottom still in shadow, the higher rocks already in sun and the moon clearly visible on the dark-blue sky...

After reaching the glacier again, above the cottage, we had a half a day of die-hard climbing, up towards the place where we would reach a flatter part of Mer de Glace with less crevices and from where we would go faster...

... you can see more pictures on this climb on Dani's site (pictures 23-32). At the end we had to give up.

Background:
Mer de Glace (like all glaciers in the world) is rapidly melting. 2003 summer caused the biggest shrinkage ever so that the glacier was practically closed since the beginning of August. Of course we asked about the conditions and of course the French Alpine information service explained us that it is impossible to go the way we want to ... and of course we did not believe them ... and of course they were right. To be more correct, it would have been possible to go climb the risky parts of the glacier, but only in the morning (before ice starts to melt from the sun) and it would have required one to two more days.

...however, it was a fun climbing with some tricky passes. When we returned to the cottage, I was dead but also Daniel had some tired expression on his face (see picture on the right)

The next day we had to get back to Chamonix by 2pm and we still wanted to climb up to another cottage, so we had to start early.
early -> cold
cold -> warm clothes
warm clothes -> sweating
sweating -> undressing
undressing -> photo (that's what you can see below)

...photo -> more undressing
more undressing -> more photo

(Just to save you some time: if you go to Dani's site, you won't see the same kind of pictures of me ... of course, it's still worth to go to Dani's site.)

Climbing up to the other cottage (where we decided to go for ski touring this winter), for a change, we had to climb some ladders and pass along some ramps that connected these ladders. Was fun.