The Right Altitude

There are those amongst us who sadly think Mont Blanc was named after a pen – not so maritime instructor Michael Toftelund, who’s been to the very tip and plans to revisit it this summer just nine months after he ‘conquered’  it . . . . alone.

‘I ended up on my own on top, my climbing colleague, Peter, started to suffer from altitude sickness at 2600 metres, just before a dangerous part of the climb and he sat it out whilst I went on to the summit,’ says Michael who this year will lead a team of four. ‘Hopefully I’ll get a decent photo of me at the top since last time it was me at an arms length.’

‘I did meet a guy on the way down and we swapped cameras and took pictures of each other, but at the top I was alone on the highest point in Europe,’ says Michael.

It’s not the photo opportunity or the summit that drives Michael back up the 4,810 metre Alp.  ‘There are stunning views that match the challenge. You can take a cable car up a large part of the journey, but that means you have to get to the top and back in a day in order to avoid altitude sickness. We take it slowly, walking the whole route from tepid pine forests, over glaciers and moonlike rock to the ice and snow. It takes four days there and back.’

All this natural realism will be a bit of a shock to Michael this time around. The newest instructor at MOSAIC, Maersk Training’s new world leading simulation centre, Michael has been helping create artificial environments for seafarers. ‘Actually if I’d still been at sea this summer I would not be revisiting Mont Blanc, I’d be heading to Nepal to trek up Island Peak and looking over towards Everest,’ adds Michael.

The extra 1,379 metres wouldn’t have troubled Michael for whom action is the only way he knows to live - it was as a ski instructor in Austria teaching Danes to come down hills safely that he got into the mountain culture. ‘I don’t rate myself as a mountaineer, it’s more like trekking that has just developed upwards,’ he says.

When in late August he returns to the five metres about water level that is home on the island of Thurø we’ll revisit his adventures and publish his account, and his climbing colleagues images of this particular expedition.