SHARED SILENCE
NO LONG-DISTANCE trail is exactly how we imagine it will be. That’s what I was thinking on my third day of the Grande Traversée du Mercantour (Mercantour Traverse) when, after climbing steep ground out of Col de la Guercha in poor visibility, I’d found myself committed to Grade 3 scrambling moves on a ridge that kept getting steeper and looser. Actually, that’s a lie. My thoughts were in fact something like: Christ! Why did nobody tell me about this?
The truth is that I hadn’t asked, because I wanted to be spontaneous. Two weeks earlier, I hadn’t even heard of the Mercantour National Park in the Maritime Alps. Now I was committed to the Grand Traverse. Very committed.
There was a path marked on the map, but from where I’d stood on the shifting screes of the col I could see only two ways ahead: a steep grey snowfield, pockmarked by stonefall impacts like some perverse lunar landscape, or a rock ridge that looked a bit scary but probably doable. I chose the latter but soon regretted my decision. It had been five years since I’d last climbed anything harder
