“She looks different,” I said, staring at the mountain. My boyfriend, Adam, and I were sitting in a rocky meadow dotted with miniature bluebells of Alpine gentian and eating ham, cheese, and cornichon sandwiches we'd packed that morning. We were at the Col de Balme, a 7,228-foot pass that marks the transition from Switzerland to France. Before us was Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe. We'd left Chamonix nine days earlier to complete the Tour du Mont Blanc, one of the most popular treks in the world—100 miles through France, Italy, and Switzerland, with 30,000 feet of cumulative elevation gain.
“You can't get the scope of her when you're in the valley,” Adam agreed. From here, the mountain, which had acquired a feminine pronoun during our hike, was broader and softer but also larger and surrounded by jagged aiguilles and compact glaciers. In one more day we'd be done circumnavigating Mont Blanc.
Until recently a 10-day trek through the Alps felt impossible to me. Not because I don't like treks. I love them. I grew up backpacking in the Rockies. After my first divorce I walked the Camino de Santiago alone. No, a trek like this was actually very “me,” but an older—and by that I mean younger—version of me. But then I became the married mother of two small children. “Maybe someday I'll walk like that again,” I'd say to myself. Then life changed. Suddenly I was no longer married and had my children only half the time. Last summer my coparent and I agreed to give each other two weeks off. Two weeks when he would take the children on a daddy vacation, and I could…do whatever I wanted.
After the tumult of the previous few years, I could have lain on a beach. But I wanted to walk. I wasn't after catharsis, exactly, but I was after a connection: with nature and with myself. An alignment in rhythm between my body and mind. Eleven years ago, at 30, I walked across Spain, wondering what the next decade would bring. Now, at 41, I was asking the question again.
The Tour du Mont Blanc traditionally sets off from Chamonix, the birthplace of European mountaineering culture. Trekkers stay in rifugi, backpacker hostels, or in hotels in the small villages. The mountains are known for unpredictable weather. I heard stories of people who had walked the entire 10 days and never seen Mont Blanc. Our first days, the sky was volatile: fast-moving clouds, fogs, mists wrapping themselves over foothills. I was stripping or arranging layers every 30 minutes. We began the second day, one of the longest at 13 miles, in pouring rain, which turned to ice pellets, and at 8,100 feet we were walking through snow. But we unloaded at Refuge des Mottets in piercing sunshine.
Mottets is an old ancestral Alpine chalet perched dramatically in the remote Vallée des Glaciers. There is a warm wood-beamed communal dining room where hikers play cards, read, and drink beer and tea. Dinner was rustic local food, served family style in stone bowls—a bean and potato soup, ratatouille with homemade pork sausage, stacks of rugged brown bread, and wedges of floral Tomme de Savoie. Afterward one of the cooks rolled out a hand-cranked music box, an instrument I had never seen, and played a song I had never heard, “Champs-Élysées.” Every French person sang along.
That day turned out to be the last of intense weather; the rest of the trek was dappled sunshine and surprising heat. The day after Refuge des Mottets, we summited Col de la Seigne and got our first view of Mont Blanc since we'd begun. She looked majestic, closed off, serrated, a totally different mountain than the one we had left. “We're back in Italy,” Adam said as we passed the nearly unmarked border and descended into the Val Veny, where a glacial river flowed turquoise against the white gravel of the valley floor.
Adam and I first met in Italy in 2005. We dated when we were 20 and studying abroad in Rome. The fact that the two of us were walking back into Italy 20 years later is another part of my life I couldn't have previously imagined.
Treks are made of routines and rituals: We applied and reapplied sunscreen. Found old stone troughs that had been turned into drinking fountains and refilled our water bladders. Adam picked up a stone to top off each cairn. We kept track of our gear, kept track of where we could have coffee.
There is a radical unburdening when each day is mostly the same: wake up, walk, eat, walk, eat, and sleep the bone-deep sleep of the deservedly exhausted.
Because of the sameness, variations in landscapes, cuisines, and weather feel even more delightful and profound. A café au lait and blueberry pie at the Refuge de Miage in France became a macchiato and a dense blueberry crostata at Il Rifugio Elisabetta Soldini Montanaro in Italy. Some rifugi served cafeteria-style plates of spaghetti or mystery meatloaf and a side of overcooked hard-boiled eggs, but I could stomach even the worst meals knowing the next night we'd be somewhere new, like in Courmayeur, the genteel and sophisticated Italian ski town where we visited gorgeous specialty food stores, buying a rotisserie chicken, oily focaccia, and take-out boxes of contorni to eat on our balcony at the Hotel Berthod. We had lunch at the extremely busy Alpage de Bovine, where the wine list was exceptional; we ordered a dozen exquisite apricot and plum tarts, carrot and lemon cakes, and a justifiably “famous” rösti, a Swiss dish of potato hash, cheese, ham, and eggs that makes caloric sense only in the Alps.
Toward the end of the tour, back on the Col de Balme and back in France, I thought about Mont Blanc's many expressions: demure, arresting, welcoming, severe. I hadn't expected the thrill of circling her or the intimacy of returning to that first view—carrying a muddier, looser version of myself. The shape of my life has changed so drastically that there are days I hardly recognize myself, but there are others when I suspect that this woman was exactly who I asked to become when I walked through Spain a decade ago. The Camino de Santiago is a straight line: You arrive one way; you leave another. The Tour du Mont Blanc isn't a pilgrimage. It offers no final absolution. It is a loop but not a closed one: a circle whose center shifts at every step, a mountain with a thousand faces, each one reflecting whatever you are carrying with you when you look up.
This article appeared in the December 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
