Don’t get blood on the ice if you can help it

In the latest in his series on memorable walks and pathways, Will Gore recalls a moment when having the right kit helped avoid injury

The Mont Blanc massif is a challenging environment (Getty)

A reading party sounds like something librarians get up to after hours.

Once upon a time, before technology ruined everything, reading parties (as in groups of people, not a hall with balloons and dancing) were quite the thing among student communities and intellectuals.

Get a bunch of smug poshos together, place them by the sea or on a mountain, add books, earnestness – and almost certainly a dab of sexual tension – and there you have it.

In literary depictions of such gatherings, someone usually ends up finding some hidden depths to the meaning of life – or murdered.

Despite going to university long after the heyday of this kind of jolly holiday (I imagine its heyday being some time around 1928), I found myself part of a college reading party in the late Nineties. Strictly, it was reading and walking – one day immersed (supposedly) in academic texts, the next hiking in the foothills of Mont Blanc.

As it goes, the setting for this old-fashioned adventure hadn’t changed much since the Twenties. The large chalet, reachable by cable car and a trek through the woods still had no electricity and no hot water: candles and gas stoves got us by.

The next day, we returned to our books, the reading half of our party’s purpose safer than the hiking. But duller too.

It had been necessary to travel light, though the presence of bulky books made that difficult.

Walks in the Haute Savoie can be challenging but we were not planning to tackle any of the major peaks. Still, one intended route crossed a smallish glacier and it had been suggested that crampons might come in handy. But they were extra baggage.

On discovering that I was the only member of the party to have them, I felt faintly idiotic – though having bought them new, I was damned if I wasn’t going to use them, even if the glacial crossing was likely to take no more than five minutes.

It had been a hot summer and when we reached the ice, more or less at the highest point of the walk, it shone brightly under the blazing sun. Even under the intense rays, however, the glacier was as hard as rock.

The chalet was sited in a remote location in the Haute Savoie (Will Gore)

I buckled the crampons to my boots and stepped forward, gripping nicely. Ahead and behind, my fellow reader-hikers struggled, slipping and sliding. By the time we had crossed the ice, knees and elbows were bleeding all over the place.

In an Agatha Christie account of the trip, the tampering with an individual’s climbing equipment would have led to them sliding off the mountain – the perfect murder. Even so, the ill-preparation of our lot, and their resulting injured joints and pride, were painful enough to deal with.

Luckily, cheap French wine and rustic stew turns out to be a good cure for walking ailments – with a drop of iodine for scraped knees.

The next day, we returned to our books, the reading half of our party’s purpose safer than the hiking. But duller too: I was wading through something terribly turgid about the Tudors and Stuarts in preparation for the next term.

Of course, had novels been on the menu, I’d not have been spent the non-walking days pining for the hills. I’d have been reading about them instead.