Ski sweater, jeans, running shoes and face weathered by the cold and the sun, Christophe Profit, 62, put his square and rough legs on the bar of the Bonneville criminal court (Haute-Savoie) to defend himself. On Thursday April 20, the high mountain guide, star mountaineer of the 1980s, was in court, in the role of an alleged thief.
The object of the crime? Four metal piles of about 1.80 m, properties of the town hall of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains (Haute-Savoie), that this member of the prestigious Compagnie des guides de Chamonix would have “fraudulently subtracted, between June 10 and July 13, 2022, on the Bosses ridge”, – located at an altitude of around 4,600 m – on the so-called “normal” route of Mont Blanc (4,807 m). An offense punishable by a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros that this supporter of mountaineering free from human and professional mountain facilities “for forty years”fiercely refutes.
Thursday, the guide, author of highly publicized solo openings in the most technical and vertiginous walls of the Alps (Drus, Grandes Jorasses, Matterhorn, Eiger, etc.), but nevertheless ordinary litigant, assured to have dismantled these piles in order to ‘“ avoid taking unnecessary risks. Located at the edge of a large crevasse recently formed, these metal rods generated, according to him, a false feeling of security. The some two hundred contenders for the summit of the Roof of Western Europe who cross paths daily, in summer, on this tapering section of several tens of meters could have been tempted to moor there.
“Adapt to the mountains”
“The question that arises is whether or not Mr. Christophe Profit has committed theft, and not how mountaineering should be practiced in our mountains, which the court would be hard pressed to say”warned the president, Anne-Sophie Vilquin, to discourage any digression on the commodification, overcrowding and regulation of access to the summit of Mont Blanc.
Purchased by the municipality of Saint-Gervais, the piles at the origin of the trial were installed on June 10, 2022 by the Compagnie des guides de Saint-Gervais, in agreement with that of Chamonix and the prefecture of Haute-Savoie, in order to ” to secure “ one of the two routes bypassing the crevasse close to the Bosses ridge. A collegial decision of which Christophe Profit, absent from the consultation meetings, would not have been aware, but which would not have won his support anyway.
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