How to do the Tour du Mont Blanc without booking in advance: Part 2

In Part 1, I wrote about how to “wing it” on the TMB by choosing the less busy times to trek. This week I am going to talk about the second way of walking the Tour du Mont Blanc without booking in advance: camping.
But that’s completely obvious, I hear you say! Everybody knows that you can camp on the TMB! Everybody knows that campers do not need to book! And everyone knows that campers have to carry a load of heavy kit around the whole TMB! Right?

Well not entirely. Whilst everyone knows that anyone may camp on the TMB, many people do not realise that these days almost anyone has the physical ability to camp on the TMB.  Have I lost you there? Well let me explain.

What I mean is that, in the last few years, the developments in lightweight camping gear have been so rapid that camping gear now weighs almost nothing: so now, almost anyone has the physical ability to carry the gear required to camp on the TMB. Not only that, if you carry lightweight camping gear and are careful about the other items you bring, I guarantee that your pack will still be lighter than most other people’s.
I can tell that you are not convinced so let me elaborate.

Camping on the Tour du Mont Blanc

When I started Alpine trekking more than 2 decades, I bought a really nice 2-man tent. It was made by Mountain Hardwear and it was really dope. It was the envy of my friends. And it weighed 3.3kg: I still have it and I checked! I carried it on many multi-day treks. It was heavy!

2 years ago on a trip to Colorado, I bought a new Marmot tent: it weighs 0.79kg. I know I am boring you now but bear with me. That is a difference in weight of 2.5kg. Putting it another way, my new tent weighs 24% of the weight of my old one. Now extrapolate that across all the items you need to camp on a trek and you begin to understand just how much weight can be saved.

So what is the minimum kit you need to camp the TMB (over and above what you already need to carry)? And how much will it weigh?

Stage 1a of the TMB: Refuge di Fioux

On the TMB you do not necessarily need to carry a stove or cooking equipment as there are plenty of shops and restaurants at which to buy food. That means that the minimum gear is as follows:

• Tent: 0.79kg
• Sleeping bag: I have a Thermarest Hyperion 0° bag which weighs 0.46kg
• Sleeping mat: Thermarest Neoair – 0.34kg
• Trekking pillow - Sea to Summit 0.06kg

So that gives an additional total weight of.....wait for it.....1.65kg! The weight of a bottle of water! That’s it. I am pretty sure that I could extract 1.65kg of unnecessary weight from many people’s packs before adding that camping gear. For example, I mentioned a few weeks ago that I upgraded my pack itself for a weight saving of 0.7kg.

Now it is fair to say that lightweight gear tends to be more expensive than the heavier stuff. But these days the price difference is often not huge if you shop around. And when you compare the cost of the gear to the money you will spend on accommodation in refuges and gîtes, it becomes a completely reasonable proposition.

So to underline the point of this article: 1.65kg extra is not the end of the world, particularly if you can shave a few oz elsewhere. And therefore almost everyone can carry camping gear these days. So almost everyone can camp on the TMB. So almost everyone can do the TMB without advance booking. QED.

And in fact, with gear weighing so little, you could even carry the camping gear just for one or two nights’ camping. So, if there were a few places that you can’t get bookings for, then bring the tent for those nights.

Ok so there are plenty of you who don’t like camping but I can’t solve all the problems!

​Well what do you think?

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