Il cerchio Bianco - Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc di Niki Gresteri

Posted on September 13th, 2017

Words & Photos: Niki Gresteri

After UTMB, I tried writing right away, but I didn't like the sound of what came out. It was as if I'd gone looking for the words before I'd found the thoughts.

I don't know if the result is any different now, but everything feels closer to the air, somehow, and maybe I do too.

Night is the most recurring landscape in my eyes. I spent two of them outdoors, and it's as if I'd sailed across endless oceans. Conrad kept coming to mind, often.

I remember the rain and cold along Col du Bonhomme.

The freezing dawn at Col de la Seigne stays with me, maybe the true watershed of my journey.

A collision between raw, virgin lights and total darkness, time's descent into Mont Blanc's sidereal spaces, and the icy rise of the day, in a symphony that exists only inside my head.

I stop to watch the Peuterey Ridge tear through clouds heavy with ink, like a sailing ship, carrying all the words I've never written.

I look into the glacier's fog, that suffering Brouillard, a dull ache through which I too lost something.

The reason I'm here is to try to understand what lies on the other side. On the other side of the mountain, of the night, of the uncertainty, of the fear.

I'll find something, and whatever it turns out to be will be genuinely enough.

Because whatever can be born from a journey like this comes closest to the purest, most honest thing there is, close to a child's sense of wonder.

Mont Blanc is always at my side, but hidden.

Mont Blanc is a distant planet, planted right there in the middle, unreachable, and yet it holds me in its orbit.

Somewhere out there, the Grandes Jorasses too, invisible, gigantic. The snowstorm's already with me by the Bonatti, growing heavier along the ridge of the Grand Col Ferret.

I climb slowly, as if moving through layers of fatigue, memory, and dream.

Everything's white, cold, the air turquoise. I see an endless line still climbing, and for a moment it all feels senseless. I want to stop, but I understand that right now I'm losing sight of my own reason for being here. Small steps, small, simple thoughts. I refocus, calmly, my needs are few, I have what I need, and it's inside my own head.

I decide I'll reach La Fouly, drink a broth, then keep going, aid station after aid station. In and out of the night.

Small, simple thoughts, and everything will be fine.

I stop a couple of times, just a few minutes total, sinking into a tiny sleep. My windbreaker is my den, my shelter, my home.

My eyes burn, heavy, I stumble through my own thoughts, seeing faces in the rocks and roots.

Animals shaped from trees, a strong scent of resin, a freshly baked cake, a kind face. Someone passes by, another wanderer in the rain. A black, silent ghost, but carrying an umbrella. I smile, because this one's real!

In Praz-de-Fort, a friendly village aid station sets me right again with a good warm tea, and the passes go by, one after another. Then, at La Giète, there's a girl behind a bonfire, she could belong to any past, any story.

Her cheekbones catch the light of the flames.

I wish she'd play the violin.

I wish she'd play, it would be magnificent.

But I don't stop, I want to get out of this overpowering night, or I'll never move again.

I'm nearing the end of my journey, and I understand I'll only be able to finish it with what I don't have, with what, perhaps, I never thought I had.

There's a crowd of people around, so many dreaming children. Everyone's cheering, it's wonderful. This whole story, my story, is something simple, nothing all that important. My run around Mont Blanc is just a journey that began a long time ago.

But it'd be lovely to know that in the eyes of all these children, a small dream is growing. To know that someone, one day, will set off with humility and respect for nature, still trying to understand what lies on the other side of a mountain, and, before that, on the other side of themselves.

I'm at La Flégère, and the sun's out. Blue sky, a warm, gentle breath of air.

Preludes of infinity, right here, in front of Mont Blanc.

One more descent left, and I'll reach Chamonix.

What I feel is something very close to nostalgia, because I'm nearing the end, and it'll be hard to line up everything that's happened inside me.

These are the final steps, I run a little further still.

This is Chamonix, on a magnificent September Sunday.

The hands I touch, the eyes I meet, the smiles, the shouting.

I think about how long the road was that brought me here, right now. And it has nothing to do with Mont Blanc, it's everything that happened before it.

Now there's one last bend, then the finish. A three-year-old boy pops out, blond, and gives me a high five, right in the middle of the road, so far into it he nearly knocks me over. I smile at him, say hello, but he hugs me instead, clinging to my shorts, as if he doesn't want to let go, as if he'd seen something.

I don't know what to do, I smile at him again, and gently let him go.

I don't know what he saw in me, but maybe we'd lived the same dream.

The same dream, perhaps, that I too carried once, as a child. A universal dream, the eternal unconscious pull of beauty we carry within us, even before birth, in our mother's womb.

It all starts there, from the roots.

So that's my why, the meaning of this journey, a small child looking at his own dream, and his dream is tomorrow.

In the end, it's something so simple it almost hurts.

I've arrived.

It's all as simple as a white circle.