Dent du Géant

Among the snow domes and broad ridges of the Mont Blanc massif, the Dent du Géant — the Giant's Tooth — is the shape nobody mistakes. It is a sheer monolith of pale granite rising from the Rochefort ridge on the frontier between France and Italy, a blunt fang standing straight up out of the glacier world. It has two tops a few metres apart: Pointe Sella at 4,009 m and the slightly higher Pointe Graham at 4,013 m, which makes it one of the Alpine four-thousanders.

Its history is a small drama of mountaineering ethics. In 1880 Albert Mummery and his guide Alexander Burgener tried the south-west face, were turned back by smooth slabs, and Mummery pronounced it "absolutely inaccessible by fair means". Two years later the Italian guide Jean Joseph Maquignaz and his sons Baptiste and Daniel spent four days fixing iron stanchions and ropes to the rock, and on 28 July 1882 they reached the lower summit, Pointe Sella; the Sella brothers, Alessandro, Alfonso, Corradino and Gaudenzio, climbed it soon after. A few weeks later, on 20 August, the Englishman W. W. Graham, with the Chamonix guides Auguste Cupelin and Alphonse Payot, used the same fittings to reach the higher point, which now carries his name. The ascent is often taken as the close of the "silver age" of Alpine climbing, when the last great unclimbed summits fell.

The normal route climbs the south-west face, the one that defeated Mummery; it is graded AD and is a serious rock climb at over 4,000 m rather than a walk. For those who stay on the ground, the spectacle is the view: from the terrace of Punta Helbronner or from the Torino Hut, the tooth stands just across the glacier, with the Grandes Jorasses and the Brenva face of Mont Blanc around it, and its granite turns gold and then red in the evening light.

Getting there

On the Italian side, the Skyway Monte Bianco cable car climbs from Pontal d'Entrèves near Courmayeur via Pavillon du Mont Fréty to Punta Helbronner at 3,466 m, from where the Torino Hut (3,375 m), the usual base for the climb, is reached by an internal tunnel and stairs. Aosta is about 32 km away and Martigny in Switzerland about 28 km, both as the crow flies. The nearest airport is Annecy (NCY), about 67 km away; in Italy, Turin Airport (TRN) is about 92 km. The summit itself is for experienced climbers or guided parties only.