Day 5: Chamonix: What A Piece Of Work Is Man!

Bear Clifton
17 min readJan 23, 2025

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In August of 2024, Janis and I celebrated our 40thanniversary with a 12-day hiking trip to the Swiss Alps (dipping our hiking sticks briefly into France as well). Though finding play-time to write is very challenging in this season of my life, at last I’ve been able to jot down some thoughts about another unforgettable day in our Swiss vacation. Hope you enjoy my ramblings and reflections.

August 23, 2024

From here on out, whenever I encounter a challenge that appears impossible to fathom or face, I will remember Chamonix and the examples it showed me of human tenacity.

Janis and I woke up to summer-perfection on the fifth morning of our vacation. To be able to drink my first cup of coffee on this hotel balcony on this morning, watching sunrise-spears poke through the towering mountain parapets above me, was an unforgettable privilege.

Wordsworth, writing of an Alpine sunrise in his masterpiece The Prelude, described his experience as “a flash that…revealed the invisible world”. I now had some insight into what he meant.

Our hearty hotel breakfast of eggs, juices, fruit, and homemade breads set us up nicely for a day exploring the mountains. For $35 a plate mind you. Restaurants in Switzerland came as advertised — you better be hungry because you’re going to pay for it (and if you eat too much fondue or raclette, in more ways than one).

Our Schedule

Our schedule for the day was ambitious and broke out in two parts. Picture a V with Chamonix in the middle. Part 1 was to hike to the top left of the V, to the picturesque mountain lake, Lac Blanc, hidden in the folds of the La Flégère mountain ski area just above Chamonix to the northeast. We then had a 4:00pm timed ticket aboard one of the highest cable cars in the world, to ascend the famous Aiguille du Midi on the other side of the V. Both were included in a Mont Blanc Day Pass we purchased, so we were going to take our best shot at doing both.

It seemed like cheating to walk luggagelessly from the hotel down the steep slope that had crushed us like a bug the day before. As we ambled through Chamonix’s town-center, we passed a team of construction workers assembling a massive gateway of metal poles. That’s when we remembered that Chamonix was the home to one of the world’s most famous foot races, the UTMB — the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc — which was only a week away. One of the workers confirmed for us that this was indeed the start and finish line for the great race.

The UTMB is a 106-mile race that follows the Tour du Mont Blanc, a classic hiking loop that encircles the famous mountain through France, Italy, and Switzerland. The best runners complete it in just over 20 hours, while most finishers take between 30 hours and the maximum allowed time of 46.5 hours. A third of the more than 2,000 participants (who go through a challenging application process to just qualify) do not even officially finish.

I took up running late, around my 40 thbirthday, and could run a half-marathon at my peak. But then I began hearing about people who ran ultra-marathons, long distance races of thirty to even 100 miles a crack. Surely that was nothing but a rumor. Who could, or would, do such a thing? Then a year ago, I actually met one of these crazy souls who ran these races and lived to tell about it, when he began attending our church. I should text Nathan and tell him where I’m standing, I thought.

We couldn’t help but stop for a moment of silence to take it in, but Janis and I had our own race to run. So it was on to Lac Blanc.

In Search Of Lac Blanc

To get there, we needed to hop on the next eastbound train one stop to the village of Le Praz. Once on the train, we found ourselves standing beside a young couple who had just arrived from Australia to compete in the UTMB and were off to take a training run that morning. They weren’t returning home afterwards either. Their plan was to settle down here and start a new life. (Mountains can do that to you.) We wished them a happy life as we got off at Le Praz.

It was a short walk to the gondola which took us halfway up the mountain, giving us just enough time to visit with another 20-something, an officeworker from London who told us she came to see a friend, and woke up that morning deciding on a whim to go on her first hike ever. “What advice would you give a newbie?” she asked, and that’s when I noticed she was wearing flipflops, had no map, and carried no water. “Well, you might not survive the day, and certainly not to your 30s,” was what I thought. But instead I said something about always having water and sunscreen for a day like this.

We committed her to Nature and Nature’s God as we transferred from the gondola to a set of chairlifts for the final leg up to the Index La Flégère, where we were plopped onto the Lac Blanc trail at nearly 8,000 feet. The mountains on this side of the V were play-mountains, where hang-gliders and wingsuiters frolicked.

But our gaze was drawn south across the valley to the Real Mountains. For there stretched the full expanse of the Mont Blanc range, where His Majesty held court on a continent-sized dais surrounded by toothy-peaked courtiers, and each crevice was clothed with glacier-robes made of rock and water that dissolved into forest below.

As we set out on the hike, a pair of hang-gliders floated above us in the distance, and for a second, the mountains felt small, possessable, as if you could lean over and grasp them in your hands. But then when I looked earthward again, I realized how silly that was. For I was the small one, fragile as the Alpine marmot that scrambled over the rocks with us, dwarfed by stone giants who, should they sneeze, might let loose an avalanche upon us.

Ancient Paths

Jeremiah 6:16 bids us to “look for the ancient paths” if we hope to find God and rest for our souls. The path scratched out on the mountainside was surely an ancient one. It was ancient when Wordsworth first walked it 235 years ago. It was part of a network of paths that were ancient when the Roman general Hannibal crossed them with his elephants 2,200 years ago. In fact, somewhere in this chain of mountains between Italy and Austria, the mummified remains of Otzi the Iceman was found, who was shot in the back with an arrow 5,300 years ago.

It was just at that moment as I was contemplating the shortness and smallness of my life that a trail runner zipped by us on our left. And with that I smiled for another thought surfaced.

Sure, we humans are small, short-lived, often stupid ( flipflops!), and most definitely sinful. (And there is great value in remembering these things.) But there is this whole other side to us that caused Shakespeare to marvel, What a piece of work is man!

Scripture tells us we are God’s image-bearers, put on the earth to fill it and subdue it, which doesn’t mean what some think it does. It means to till it, keep it, shepherd it, steward it, explore it, care for it, create with it, and harness its resources for our happiness and the love of our neighbor. We are no longer in marmot territory here. We are solidly in “Man — how like a god!” territory.

One UltraMaranthoner’s Experience

All this I saw in the trail-runner. And then remembered Nathan Dunham, the ultramarathoner from our church. I sat down with Nathan shortly after he had run the 100-mile Rim To River ultramarathon in the New River Gorge area of West Virginia to hear of his experience.

Nathan and Gabby

There were 250 runners who competed, and 180 who “finished” under the allotted window of 32 hours. (And what do you receive for your 32 hours of a near-death experience? Not only a belt buckle — the badge of honor for ultramarathoners — but also…and who wouldn’t train months for this?…a mug!)

The vertical gain over the up and down course was around 12,000 feet (compared to 33,000 feet for the UTMB), but a good share of runners swear that going down is harder than going up.

Nathan got into ultramarathoning in 2019, inspired by his father who began to run them back in the late 90s. This was his first crack at a 100-miler after doing five 31-milers, and one 50. He’s a strong, muscular, 6-foot tall man around 30 — definitely not the lean, small “ectomorph” body type often associated with long distance running (That’s not a word from Men In Black; it’s actual running lingo. Ectomorph. Try it on your co-worker or spouse the next time they start to annoy you.) For ultramarathons, Nathan didn’t think one body type mattered over another. As he described the experience to me, it certainly seemed that mental fitness was as much a key as the physical.

The Rim To River race began at 6:00am on a crisp October morning. He stuffed in a good breakfast beforehand, and intentionally started slow, to get his body warmed up, while pushing back some nervousness and a case of imposter syndrome that dogged him at first. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the trail was well marked, and he had done considerable headlamp-training in the dark leading up to the race.

He ran with an Osprey pack carrying extra layers of clothes, and a water bladder he could drink from while running. Aid stations were positioned every 5 to 10 miles. At seven miles in he met his crew, comprised of his father and his wife Gabby. With the sun up, he found his rhythm and felt good.

At 17 miles (about the time when they’d be transporting me to the hospital in an air ambulance), he stopped for five minutes to feast on pasta and donuts. Hydration with electrolyte-rich drinks and replenishing calories (150–300 an hour) are keys for sustaining energy for the duration. For the first fifty miles, his mind felt alert, with mental margin enough to occasionally pray and appreciate the beauty of his surroundings. But as he headed into the second half of the race, “There was nothing”, Nathan said.

He met his crew at the 52-mile mark at 6:30 as the sun fled into night. Darkness brought what darkness usually does — fatigue, cold, and loss of focus. He had trained for night-running, but not for sleeplessness. His father joined him on the trail at 58-miles as a pacer. (Nathan told me his father didn’t finish the first three ultras he ran; it was only when he added a pacer to his team the fourth time that he made it across the finish line.)

It was comforting to see his father appear out of the darkness, “because he had done it before and knew what I was feeling”, Nathan told me. And what he was beginning to feel was an almost indescribable misery (though he did his best to describe it with words like “zombie-walk” and “death-march”.)

In the first half of the race, it was 60/40 running to walking. But the last half was 90/10 walking, at a consistent 3-mile-per-hour pace. At 70 miles he said to himself that it was going to suck the rest of the way, so he might as well just finish, which meant crossing the finish line before the 32-hour mark.

He popped caffeine pills and tried to ward off the cold with added layers. But at 80 miles, on a rest break, he just sat in a chair wrapped in a blanket shivering uncontrollably, while Gabby force-fed him an egg sandwich. At 85 miles, the sun started to rise, reviving his spirits slightly. Six hours later, at 1:16 in the afternoon, Nathan crossed the finish line, at 31 hours and 16 minutes. He had won his belt buckle and mug.

The finish however brought him “to the bottom of the well”. His feet were so swollen he couldn’t put on his sandals. “I’m wrecked,” was all he could say, as he fell asleep right there in the parking lot and had to be lifted up into the car. It took several hours for his brain fog to clear, several days to shake a low-grade fever that came over him, and nearly a week for his legs to return to normal.

On To The Real Mountains

Unfortunately, we would not get our buckle for Lac Blanc that day.

As I monitored our pace, I realized we were going to cut it too close getting back to Chamonix by 4:00, so we aborted our mission and headed back to the chairlifts at the Index. But it was far from a waste. The 2 to 3 hours on this trail were one of the most transcendent hiking experiences we had ever enjoyed. (It reminded me of a famous scene from The Fellowship of the Ring, and even gave us the sense that we were somehow part of it. See for yourself.)

If Nathan and our trail runner were Exhibit A of human resilience, Exhibit B was surely the death-and-mountain-defying gondola ride up the Aiguille du Midi, and what we discovered once we got there.

Mont Blanc, at 14,777-feet, is the tallest mountain in the Alps. Its summit can only be reached by climbing it old-school style. Since it’s perpetually snow-covered, it’s also one of the deadliest. (Four climbers perished there in a September snowstorm, two weeks after we left.)

The mountain of Aiguille du Midi ( Needle of the Mid-Day — aptly named as you stand on the valley floor and look up) positions you at 12,605-feet directly adjacent to Mont Blanc and is accessed by an easy 30-minute gondola ride, making it one of the single-most popular attractions in Europe, visited by a half-million tourists a year.

What was far from easy is how this gondola ride came to be.

The story of its construction stretches all the way back to 1910, when the idea was just the wisp of a dream of village planners hoping their valley could become a year-round recreational resort, if only they could find a way to tame the mountains. It’s a tale of bankruptcy, inadequate technology, impossible weather, and two World Wars continually scuttling the project, until 40 years of construction is abandoned altogether, when engineering advances allowed for the construction of the present route.

And my goodness, the engineering alone leaves you breathless. The first stage of the ride lifts you 4,200 feet from the valley floor to the mid-stage station of Plan de l’Aiguille, where abundant hiking trails fan out. It’s the second stage of the trip — rising another 4,800 feet, above glaciers and seemingly straight up the mountain face, with no supporting pillars — that leaves you gasping in wonder.

Then when you arrive at the top station of Piton Nord, and step out onto the first of numerous viewing platforms, you realize how fortunate you are to be alive at this time, on this day, in this place to take in what your eyes are seeing.

From The Top

Back in the 1920s, when the first sections of the original gondola route were opened to the public (taking you only halfway up the mountain), it cost the average worker a month’s wages for the experience! Our two Mont Blanc Day Passes cost $200, a virtual steal for what we were able to enjoy for the next couple of hours.

Mount Blanc seemed so close we could hear its breath, wrapped in a scant mountain breeze (which we later learned was fortunate, for the winds are usually lashing in your face like a lion’s tail up here. There’s no question we hit the weather bullseye.)

But Mont Blanc was hardly the main event. We were swimming in a waterless coral reef of alpine peaks. To the south and east, we could look deep into Italy. (There was even an additional gondola ride we could purchase that would take us to the Italian side, just to say we had been there. But we would have to save it for another day.)

To the north, we could scan the route we took across La Flégère, or look further up and out to Switzerland. Look down, and there was the entire valley floor from Chamonix to Le Praz, giving us a God’s-eye view of how small we really are. Marmots! Ectomorphs!

Meanwhile all around us dozens of Lilliputian adventure-seekers and mountain climbers were scrambling all over the snowy and rocky terrain around us. If it jutted out, it must be climbed. If it was icy, it must be traversed. If it was cold, it must be felt. If it was beyond our reach, it must be grasped. If it seems impossible, it must be tried anyway. Fill the earth and subdue it!

All the while we were breathlessly (literally! the thin air was a thing) cavorting like children around an entire complex of platforms, tunnels, buildings, towers, elevators, restaurants, museums, even a transparent cube — the Void — which we could walk out on if we wanted to peer down into the gaping maw of death. All of it dug, dynamited, bored, carved, and chiseled into a 12,000 foot mountain. A mountain humans treated like a granite whale that we had harpooned with drills and gondola cables, and were now bending every square inch into submission for our pleasure. (Later I learned a 7-mile tunnel was opened up beneath Mount Blanc to connect France with Italy. The nerve of us!)

Here it was all over again — the audacity of humans, filling and subduing the earth, refusing to act our age…and size and strength and limits.

From The Bottom

So what are we humans: small or great? I asked myself on the gondola ride back down into Chamonix. And the answer was simple, I concluded. Yes.

Yes, we are small, pitifully small, and there are many occasions when that is a highly useful truth to grab hold of. In the end, any greatness we have is utterly contingent and dependent on God. The story is told of an atheist who challenged God to a man-making contest. God said sure, then nodded to the atheist to go first. He bent down to pick up a handful of dirt at which point God stopped him and said, “No, you have to get your own dirt.”

But having said that, yes, we are great as well, because God made us so and says we’re so. He told us to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it at a time when the only computer power we had was between our ears. Otzi the Iceman was obeying God when his clock ran out on him so long ago.

And I think this was what Chamonix was trying to teach me on this once-in-a-lifetime day. To not let my smallness hold me back, or freeze me in place, or keep me from at least trying to move my life forward in some small way.

When I asked Nathan later on how he was able to pull off the audacious thing he did, he said, “Resilience was less the 31 hours of running, but the weeks and months that led up to it.”

From my own small experience of running, I understood what he meant. The first time I ever tried to run, I couldn’t complete the .7 mile loop around my home, but pulled up out of breath (at sea-level no less). But I kept trying. Two weeks later, I completed the loop. Two months later I could run three miles without stopping.

Because God made us trainable, with bodies that could be conditioned, brains that are neuro-elastic, and souls that could tap into divine reservoirs of strength, change — though far from easy — is possible. But you first have to take a step. Then another. And another.

Then remember you can’t do it alone. You need to have pacers beside you to coach you along and stuff egg sandwiches in your face. The entrepreneur needs the investor who needs the engineer who needs the builder who needs the worker.

And you can’t do it without grace. Success is a three-legged chair of talent, hard-work, and opportunity. Opportunity has to do with all the intangible things around us that can’t be controlled, which must line up with our talent and hard-work for it to pay off. What good is the fitness to hike and the gondola to get you to the trailhead, if the mountain is socked in by clouds?

You can’t do it without faith either, that will help you face your fears and step into the Void when it seems like you’re hanging in mid-air.

You can’t do it without hope that will help you fail forward and keep trying when bankruptcies, darkness, world-wars, and imposter syndrome bedevil you.

And you certainly can’t do it without love. Love with a Capitol-L. The awareness, even if it’s just a glimpse, of God’s passionate love for you. And the proof of it? Because you’re alive right now, and given this brief little window of time to play, dance, work, build, hike, create, see, taste, touch, hear, smell…

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” many say. But I’m not so sure that’s how it usually shakes out. We can be pretty stubborn.

Better to give yourself a moment to believe it, and then maybe you’ll be able to see it. A flash that reveals to you the Invisible World. Then go with that thought and take a step. You’ll never know where it takes you.

Bear Clifton, writer and screenwriter, is the pastor of BridgeWay Community Church in California, Maryland. His blogs, screenplays and devotionals can be enjoyed at his ministry website: trainyourselfministry.com and his writing website: blclifton.com. Bear is also the author of “Train Yourself To Be Godly: A 40 Day Journey Toward Sexual Wholeness”, “Ben-Hur: The Odyssey”, “A Sparrow Could Fall”, and his latest — “Living Under The Cross”, a collection of essays on the Beatitudes — all available through Amazon.

Originally published at https://www.trainyourselfministry.com on January 23, 2025.

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Bear Clifton
Bear Clifton

Written by Bear Clifton

Writer, pastor, founder of “Train Yourself Ministry”, culture spy, winter-hater, P-90 pretender

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