Like a rolling stone
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At 32, the high mountain guide spent six days and five nights alone in front of himself to climb the Rolling Stones route, one of the most difficult on this summit of the Mont-Blanc massif. A first solo and in winter.
“I have gone very far in terms of commitment. At the end of the end. I was so into it that I became an animal. Climbing such a route like that, in winter, alone, is the quintessence of my sport, of my practice. I touched a dream with my fingertips; it is a high point for me.” Charles Dubouloz’s voice suddenly begins to tremble, tears come to his eyes. This Wednesday afternoon in Chamonix, the 32-year-old Haute-Savoie guide, with a fine beard and tousled hair, cannot help but be overwhelmed by emotion. Exalted and exhausted: he has just come down from the mountain, where he fought hard for six days to climb, alone, the Rolling Stones route, one of the most difficult routes in the Alps, which had never been climbed alone. What’s more, in the freezing cold of January, in the shadow of the north face of the Grandes Jorasses, which does not see the sun of the day in this season.
This face holds a unique place in the hearts of mountaineers. Hidden in the depths of the Mont-Blanc massif, it aligns Himalayan dimensions: it is a wide wall of rock and ice more than a kilometer high, “incredibly stiff for the massif”, Who “imposes a mute threat on the landscape: implacable, it bars the horizon. There, we do not pass, summarizes the guide writer Claude Gardien, in his monograph the Grandes Jorasses (Glénat, 2019). It is precisely for this reason that for a century, the…