And this year, Jacques Mourey, climber and geomorphologist at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc, published his findings tracking 40 years of change on routes detailed in the 1973 guide The Mont Blanc Massif: The 100 Finest Routes. He talked to 31 climbing guides, trail managers, guidebook editors, and first ascensionists about how conditions on 95 routes in the book had evolved. Of those, according to his sources, 93 had changed as temperatures increased—and of those 93, 26 had been “greatly affected,” which meant that those routes can no longer be climbed in summer, and had grown more dangerous and technically difficult. And three routes just don’t exist anymore. Shrinking glaciers, loss of snow and ice cover, and melting permafrost contributed to those increased hazards. Mourey concludes in the study that “periods during which these [routes] can be climbed in good conditions in summer have tended to become less predictable and periods of optimal conditions have shifted toward spring and fall, because the [routes] have become more dangerous and technically more challenging.”
So far, no one’s performed such detailed assessments for routes in the States. But longtime climbers and guides say conditions are changing here too, potentially adding new dangers. The Black Ice Couloir, on the Enclosure in Grand Teton National Park, is one name-brand classic that’s changed. Typically, the eight-pitch route features 1,200 feet of permanent alpine ice. But in recent years, the route’s occasionally melted away and become unclimbable. “In the time since I started climbing to the turn of the century, [the route] was more or less there,” says Andrew Carson, owner of Jackson Hole Mountain Guides. “But in the last 20 or so years it has melted out—there was nothing there.” Overeem says there have been more rocks tumbling down from Middle Teton in recent years, too, according to the park’s climbing rangers, who warned her of the dangers during a recent trip.
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