On the third floor of a small building on Rue Whymper, three streets back from the centre of Chamonix, the IFMGA-certified mountain guide Hubert Vionnay keeps a flat-files cabinet of his own maps.
The cabinet is wooden, made by Vionnay's father in 1978. It contains 1,400 sheets of A3 tracing paper, each with a route drawn on it in pencil and amended in coloured pencil over the years.
Vionnay, who is sixty-three, has guided in the Mont Blanc massif since 1986. He carries a Swisstopo or an IGN sheet on every climb. He also carries, in the lid of his rucksack, a piece of tracing paper.
The tracing paper is the route as Vionnay himself has come to know it. It contains, in pencil, the line of the climb. It contains, in red, the variations that go better in early season. It contains, in green, the variations that go better when the glacier is open. It contains, in blue, the places where parties have come to grief.
The blue marks, on a sheet of the Frendo Spur, were six. Vionnay said: "Two of them are mine. Four are clients I have heard about from other guides."
The practice is not unusual. Most working alpine guides keep some form of private cartography. The Italian guide Riccardo Cassin reportedly kept a notebook of route variations from his first ascents in the 1930s. The British guide Don Whillans famously refused to keep notes at all, and complained about it.
The current Chamonix guides' company, the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, was founded in 1821 and is the oldest mountain guiding organization in the world. Its 230 active members include thirty-one who have been guiding for more than forty years.
Vionnay is one of them. He apprenticed under his uncle, Marcel Vionnay, who guided in the Aiguilles from 1948 until his retirement in 1992.
The tracing-paper practice came from his uncle. The cabinet was built for the purpose. The drawer marked "Aiguille du Midi" contains sixty-eight sheets. The drawer marked "Grandes Jorasses" contains forty-three. The drawer marked "Mont Blanc by all routes" contains seventy-one.
Each sheet is a route. Some routes have multiple sheets: a summer version and a winter version, sometimes a shoulder-season version. The Walker Spur drawer holds eleven sheets, one for each significant condition Vionnay has encountered.
On the morning of June 1, Vionnay took out the Walker Spur sheets and laid them on the kitchen table. The earliest was dated August 1989, his third ascent of the route. The latest was dated September 2024.
The 1989 sheet showed a clean line. The 2024 sheet showed the same line in pencil, but overlaid with red marks at three points where rockfall, since 1989, had altered the rock.
"The route has not changed," Vionnay said. "The route on the page changes because what I have seen has changed."
The distinction is important. The route is a thing in the mountain. The map of the route is a thing in the guide. The two are continuous but not identical.
This is, in one sense, the principle of all cartography. The map is not the territory. In a working guide's flat-files, it is the principle's domestic version: the map is the territory as one human has come to read it.
Vionnay has, in recent years, begun to give his sheets to younger guides at the company. He photocopies the original, keeps the original in the cabinet, and gives the copy to whichever aspirant is about to climb the route for the first time.
He has given out, by his count, perhaps 240 sheets since 2018. They go into other rucksacks. They are amended by other pencils.
"It is the only inheritance I have to leave," Vionnay said. "My uncle gave me his. I am giving mine."
The cabinet will, when Vionnay retires, be donated to the Compagnie des Guides' small archive in the Maison de la Montagne on Place de l'Église. The sheets will sit there, in their drawers, available for consultation by any working guide.
The Swisstopo and IGN sheets that Vionnay has used over forty years are also in his flat. They are in a box, not a cabinet. They are, in his estimation, the public record. The cabinet holds the private one.
