Valentine Fabre has no reason to doubt her abilities in the mountains. The 45-year-old Frenchwoman helped her country earn two world championships in ski mountaineering, a high-adrenaline endurance sport that involves sprinting up and racing down mountains on skis. She is also a military-trained doctor with a focus on high-mountain medicine, and a resident of the French Alps for 20 years.
But when Fabre first started to consider her most recent challenge, she really wasn’t sure she could do it. Her goal was to set a women’s speed record on one of the most storied multiday ski routes in the Alps: the Haute Route, which winds up and down more than 26,000 feet of mountainous landscape and across more than 65 miles of glaciers and remote alpine passes to connect Chamonix, where Fabre lives, to Zermatt in neighbouring Switzerland.
It is a route that has a special meaning for Fabre, beyond its near-mythic status among mountaineers. In 2010, her husband, Laurent Fabre, was part of the team that set a new men’s speed record on the Haute Route, completing the itinerary — which takes most experienced skiers six or seven days to do — in just 20 hours, 28 minutes. Two years later, Laurent Fabre, who worked as a high mountain guide, died in a climbing accident outside of Chamonix. Valentine Fabre was on call at the hospital when she got the news.
In April, almost nine years after her husband’s death, Fabre — alongside her American teammate Hillary Gerardi — established a women’s speed record on the Haute Route with a time of 26 hours, 21 minutes. Fabre credits Gerardi’s enthusiasm for giving her the push she needed to take on the challenge, which was documented in a 34-minute film released in September.
I reached Fabre at her home in Chamonix a few days before Christmas. She described what it felt like to set the record, why she hopes someone will break it soon, and how — even though she grew up near Paris — she always knew she would make her home in the mountains.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It’s a ski route that connects the two capitals of French and Swiss mountaineering, Chamonix and Zermatt, going through the high mountains and over glaciers. The itinerary we took was 107 kilometres long (about 66 miles), with 8,100 metres (26,500 feet) of positive elevation gain. There are several variations, but we took the pretty classic high route. Back in the 19th century, I think it was a big challenge — people wanted to connect these two cities, which they first did by foot, groping their way through the valleys, looking for the best way. The route was done on skis for the first time in 1903, and I’m lucky enough to have had access to the photo album that documents that first expedition. They managed to bring along a camera that weighed nearly 42 pounds, and they took some incredible photos. I think it took them about two or three weeks.
— The New York Times
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