Tour du Mont Blanc Hike

Something that brings me a lot of joy and happiness is to push my body and discover the most incredible experiences available in this world. To keep pushing my limits, both physically and mentally, and get the opportunity to capture some of the world's most surreal places and feel the feeling of being on top of the world. That's what I want to spend the rest of my life doing: chasing that feeling.

So I suppose that's why, when Connor reached out in May to ask if I wanted to hike the TMB this summer, one of the world's greatest long distance multi-day hikes, I wholeheartedly said yes!

The Tour du Mont Blanc is a 165km hiking loop around Mont Blanc, with nearly 9km of elevation gain into the sky, through 3 countries: France, Switzerland and Italy. You can go as fast or as slow as you want, staying in your choice of the many refuges (mountain huts) along the way at night. I know people who've done the whole loop in 3 days, and others who take it slow and go for 12 days. Connor, a friend and fellow hiker from Vancouver, and I planned a 9-day trek on the TMB.

I will attempt to summarize my journey with my words and photographs - a journey that pushed my body, drained my energy, but refilled my mental clarity and strength, reminding me that I can do just about anything I set my mind to. Here's how it went...

How to Plan the Tour du Mont Blanc and Where to Start

I've broken down the guide below per day, including total distance, elevation gain, elevation loss and where we stayed each night. In total across our 9 days, we hiked 164.86km and climbed 8815m in elevation.

You can find our exact hiking route on Strava, with all the trail details.

Although you can book your accommodation up to a year in advance, I suggest not leaving it to any longer than 4 months before you set off. We booked just 6 weeks out, and although we still found places to stay, the available huts were not all spaced out equally, so we ended up with 3 particularly long and a couple of really short hiking days.

You have to pre-book your entire route for the Tour du Mont Blanc in advance which you do on the official TMB website by selecting your route and refuges as one package.

Also note, we hiked the entire TMB in reverse, due to the low availability of huts. The typical route begins in Les Houches, which you can easily reach by train, and heads south towards Italy, then loops up and around through Switzerland (counter-clockwise). However, I can wholeheartedly recommend hiking clockwise. We genuinely preferred all the descents and ascents this way around. Plus, it wasn't nearly as busy!

Day 1: Les Houches to Gîte Tupilak

Total distance: 1.9km

Total elevation gain: 242m

Total elevation loss: 0m

Refuge we stayed at: Gîte Tupilak

Countries: France

Having been delayed by 2 days with severe food poisoning and spending those 48 hours either sleeping or bent over my toilet, my preparedness to spend 9 days hiking through 3 countries was thin. I missed out on the pre-hike Connor and I had planned in Zermatt, but managed to buy a new train ticket and reroute my journey to travel 11 hours from Salzburg in Austria (home) to Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland on 6 trains, each more beautiful than the last. 24 hours in Lauterbrunnen, fueled by raclette and overpriced coffee, and I was ready to get into the mountains.

6 more trains brought us to the mountain town of Les Houches, the world famous start point of the Tour du Mont Blanc. And while day 1 for us wasn't technically part of the official climb, I counted it anyway as we started from the official TMB gate in Les Houches and climbed to our refuge at Gîte Tupilak for the night.

It was a steep and sweaty climb and upon arrival, realized we forgot to tell them in advance that I'm vegetarian, so the massive portion of bacon pasta bake served up for dinner wasn't quite going to cut it. Luckily, the owner very kindly whipped up a sublime tomato-caper-fennel-spaghetti dish for me, chased down with a decadent meringue with Greek yoghurt and honey for dessert.

Over dinner, we met two girls from Bellingham in Washington, USA, just across the border from where I grew up in Vancouver in Canada. Kate and Alyssa's energy was infectious. Alyssa was bouncing off the walls with excitement and Kate was a ray of wonderful sunshine. We realised the next morning when we met, bleary-eyed for breakfast, that because we were doing the hike in opposite directions, we'd get to cross paths, hopefully, somewhere along the way.