Faced with the climate crisis, mountaineering adapts and changes its way

The mountaineer rope stops near a crevasse, hesitates, then resigns itself to turn around: the climb to the Col du Replat (3,327 m) in the Alps, a race formerly easy, has become too risky, the fault of climate change which plans the glacier.

“This pretty slope, which was before really a classic of the initiation of mountaineering in the writings, is increasingly steep. Nevertheless, It becomes a little exposed. However, The conditions deteriorate fairly quickly. However, ” notes Thomas Boillot, a high mountain guide who knows this massif with horseback between Isère and the Hautes-Alpes.

Fonte des glaciers. Moreover, landslides, moraines that have become impracticable because of the thaw, bare and impassable crevices: the Alps, struck hard by global warming, are in full metamorphosis and mountaineering has no choice but to “adapt” to the conditions that become more uncertain and difficult, explain the professionals of faced climate crisis, mountaineering adapts the mountain.

– “soft glacier” –

Like many of his colleagues. Thomas Boillot says he has given up “for more than ten years” to lead customers to Mont-Blanc, which he now considers “too dangerous” because of the stone falls, especially in the infamous taste corridor, nicknamed “death corridor”.

“Days like today, it’s still great, on the other hand you have to choose your slots. It no longer makes you want to come when it is too hot. that the glacier is all soft, and you hear water flow, suspect noises,” he said.

Many of the “100 most beautiful races” of the Mont-Blanc massif. listed in 1973 by the mountaineer Gaston rebuffs in a book still referring, are already more accessible, such as the Bonatti pillar, a collapsed wall in 2005, or other itineraries once “archical”.

For Clément Carpentier. the UCPA mountaineer rope guide which had to turn around on the glacier, nothing is more normal faced climate crisis, mountaineering adapts than having constantly in mind “of plans B, C, D, E” to cope with the field conditions, the vagaries of the weather or the difficulties of a client.

But it goes further now: the upheavals induced by global warming have changed the calendar of summer races. too hot and uncertain, for the benefit of “seasonal wings”.

More generally, they push the profession to “reinvent themselves, find new routes (…) practice another type of mountaineering which may be less turned towards performance. towards the summit at all costs, but more at the time, the travel side in very wild valleys”, he estimates.

“The image of mountaineering, in many people, is still the glacier, snow, and less the rock. We have to show the general public that it is not that it. In the mountains, there are lots of things to do and that is always there,” he underlines.

– “Shout in the desert” –

The Guides. faced climate crisis, mountaineering adapts Guardians of Shelters, at the forefront of the upheavals observed in the field, have always shared their information, but these, “volatiles”, were often lost on the way, notes Jean-Marc Vergeon, president of the National Syndicat of Mountain Guides (SNGM).

Allied with alpine scientific laboratories. the written national park and other entities, the union recently launched a collaborative tool to make them available to researchers, practitioners and public authorities, he stresses. This site. called “Altitude Regards”, allows them to “know what is happening at the top”: it has identified on the first week of July 2025 six new events (collapse, stone falls, appearance of a glacial lake) around Chamonix.

It has been 20 years since the world of the mountain “shouts in the desert”. deplores Xavier Cailhol, a high mountain guide, and which works on a thesis dedicated to mountaineering and the risks of glacial origin.

Mountainards have “a real role of whistleblower to faced climate crisis, mountaineering adapts play by saying +these changes are irreversible. extremely fast +” for lack of application of the Paris climate agreement, said the young man of 29 years.

Mountaineering is affected today, but tomorrow it will be the rest of society, with a risk of “full social crisis”. However, it remains “little understood because too abstract”, he is alarmed.

ahe / zl