Final Exam

Le Probatoire is one of the toughest tests in the outdoors, used for decades to pick mountain professionals in Chamonix, France, the legendary hub of glacier skiing, alpinism, and deadly terrain. Only the strongest make it, but SIMON AKAM wonders: Is selection by ordeal still the best way to groom competent guides?

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FOR THE CLOSING TEST ON ICE DAY, THE WOMEN WENT LAST.

The setting was a streaked, bulbous frozen face on the fractured lower section of the Glacier du Tour, the northernmost ice sheet in the French portion of the Mont Blanc massif. The Swiss border started at the flanking ridgeline, above the newly renovated Albert Premier Hut. The altitude was around 8,400 feet, a little lower than the peaks of the Aiguilles Rouge, mostly snow-free now in July. A line of anchors and cord ran some 50 feet up the ice.

The test was straightforward enough. Using two leashless axes, candidates would have to climb the 50 feet of vertical ice, then traverse horizontally for another 20 feet, then descend. Time limit: six minutes.

It was around noon, and below the east-facing ice wall the shadow was narrow; it covered some people belaying the climbers but little else. Farther back, in blue quilted jackets supplied by the Japanese apparel firm Onyone to the École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme—France’s National School for Skiing and Mountaineering, ENSA for short—stood judges who would assess performance. Other instructors, including a doctor and a nurse, lolled on a higher ice crest in the sun.

Roughly 60 men had already been through this test. Now it was the turn of four women. Among them was Mélanie Martinot, the 32-year-old daughter of a ski instructor and ski patroller, who worked as the manager of the Refuge de l’Olan, a mountain hut at 7,690 feet in the Écrins Massif to the south.

Another was Valentine Fabre, a 42-yea-rold woman, originally from Paris, who had tried and failed to pass this test three times since 2015. “I’ve been twice to the World Cup for ski mountaineering,” said Fabre, a doctor who works for the French military. “But the only qualification that lets you teach ski mountaineering, if you want to take clients on glaciers, is to be a mountain guide.”