Thursday, April 20, Christophe Profit was tried before the criminal court of Bonneville in Haute-Savoie, for the theft of two stakes on one of the passages allowing the ascent of Mont-Blanc. A militant act that he claims in the name of “the freedom of mountaineering bivouac”. But the subject is debated. 20 minutes make the point.
Who is Christophe Profit?
Aged 62, Christophe Profit, a former member of the GMHM (High Mountain Military Group), is one of the most famous French mountaineers. He made a name for himself in 1982 with his solo ascent of a 900-meter wall on the west face of Les Drus, in the Mont-Blanc massif. Or for his winter ascent of the three most famous north faces of the Alps: the Eiger, the Matterhorn and the Grandes Jorasses.
He was also one of the big names in mountaineering who had difficulty opening glacier routes above 3,850 meters between 1980 and 1985. He is now a member of the Chamonix guide company.
Why was he tried?
The mountaineer was prosecuted for the theft, in June and July 2022, of four piles on one of the routes allowing the ascent of Mont-Blanc, including two on French territory. Arranged around a crevasse formed on the Bosses ridge, following a slide of the glacier, these iron stakes were intended to secure the ascent and secure the delicate passage. It was the company of guides from Saint-Gervais and Chamonix, of which Christophe Profit is a member, who installed them.
After having torn them off, the man had sent an email to the mayor of the town of Saint-Gervais to claim his action. A provocation to which Mayor Jean-Marc Peillex immediately responded by filing a complaint for “endangering the lives of others” and “theft”. However, the first qualification was not retained by the prosecution.
Why did he pull up those stakes?
If the mountaineer rejects the term “flight”, he prefers to put forward a militant and “political” act: “I removed these stakes to prevent amateur mountaineers without experience from taking unnecessary risks, when they there was a possible alternative route, ”he justified at the helm. Namely “a very easy path which rises gently” and which would have made it possible to avoid the passage in question. The man said he informed the mountain guides and the mayors of Saint-Gervais and Chamonix of this “variant”. Except that these letters remained unanswered.
According to him, the installation of this equipment was likely to “encourage everyone to take this passage” and thus see “200 people every day on this steep slope where it is difficult to meet”, he confided to the Dauphine Libere before the trial. The very essence of mountaineering, he recalled, is to be able to follow various paths by adapting to the vagaries of the mountain. But this perception of the practice of mountaineering is not shared by all, starting with the mayor of Saint-Gervais, denouncing “an elitist vision of the mountain”.
“Security is essential, especially when there are more and more people in nature. Me, I did my job, I did what the guides asked of me and it is not because we secure a place with a crevasse 16 meters high that we increase attendance. We are improving security, ”he recalls in the columns of the cross.
Thursday, Anne-Sophie Vilquin, the president of the criminal court, did not wish to enter the debate. But she felt that it “is not acceptable for a man to assume the right to impose his own vision of the profession of guide and mountaineering in defiance of all the others”, before requesting 4,000 euros fine, including 3,000 euros suspended. Judgment was reserved for June 5.