Tour du Mont Blanc Guidebook Review

Disclosure: I was provided with the items reviewed here free of charge by the publisher in exchange for this review. I keep full editorial control and all content and opinions below are entirely my own. I have no other relation with the publisher.

The Tour du Mont Blanc is a 169 km / 105 m circular mountain route around the Mont Blanc massif in the Alps. It’s one of the most popular treks of its kind or any kind. It goes across borders between France, Italy and Switzerland and it takes about a week to complete for an average hiker.

I haven’t hiked the TMB except for a 43 km section where it meets the GR5 trail in the French trail system, which I hiked in 2009.

Map and guidebook

Guidebook & Map

The product is meant to be a standalone resource for planning and hiking the trail. It comes in two pieces, the guidebook proper and a topo map. There’s also a GPX file available for download.

The length of the trail makes it possible to fit all the information in a packet small enough to carry with you during the hike.

The Guidebook

Around the Mont Blanc in 0.7 cm thickness

The guidebook has the most typical structure with an initial section for background and planning information, then the trail description. The route is described in anti-clockwise fashion, allegedly the most common hiking direction.

The TMB has no official track. I can guess this is mainly due to its international character, going across 3 different countries so it doesn’t belong to any national trail system. The guidebook describes a main route with several alternative sections. It includes some reasoning behind the main route choice as well as what the alternates offer.

The background & planning section of the book goes through everything you could expect: trail overview, hiking window seasonal options, weather, terrain, flora & fauna, transportation, accommodation, food & drink, resupply, gear tips, you name it. I didn’t miss anything. The descriptions are functional and to the point, this is no pleasure reading, just what a guidebook should be. A TMB resource can easily fall into information overload due to the many options and I can appreciate the organisational effort to make it thorough and keep it functional. It’s easily said than done and the author did earn his beans here.

Open book

I particularly liked the idea of a seamless route description with no stage breakdown, it fits the reality of this trail very well. There are infinite options, villages, huts, farms, often very close to each other and it’d feel unnecessarily constricting to build a stage breakdown into the narrative. Instead, it’s been taken outside. The guide includes a chart showing a section breakdown, with distance, cumulative distance and estimated time per section in 4 different use cases, namely traditional hikers, motivated trekkers, fastpackers and trail runners. The chart includes a stage breakdown proposal for every use case that’d be a good starting point and easy to tweak. All distances are in km.

The route description includes map snippets with the same scale and representation as in the separate topo map. These snippets are necessarily small and they’d have limited used for navigation but they really help locate and identify the waypoints in the description.

My favorite feature of the whole work is the effort in cross-referencing everything. The waypoints in the route description are all clearly identified in the map snippets. The timing points used for section breakdown are consistently identified in the route description, map snippets and topo map. It’s straightforward to go back and forth from text to map.

While the route description is a necessarily odd read, I appreciate the highlighted inserts with extra bits of information about lodging or food resources, these pretty obvious, but also other interesting route features that you’d probably miss if not pointed out. This is some added value from those in the know.

Wild camping

As a wild camper myself, I appreciated the mention, not always present in hiking guidebooks and often a tricky issue in the European mountains. The author explains both the official rules, which differ by country and specific area, and the informal stance in the issue so hikers can take their own informed decisions.

Small font

In an effort to make it compact, the guidebook uses rather small fonts that make for arduous reading. I understand the compromise but don’t forget your glasses if you need them for anything else. Hopefully the outdoor time will help your eyesight.

The Map

The topo map is a carefully assembled tetris of 5 trail sections and the surrounding terrain and a less detailed overview of the whole route. It also includes some background information, mostly reproduced from the same text in the guidebook, and the fully cross-referenced elevation profile, interestingly aligned with the Timing Points breakdown in a chart that includes all the distance and timing information found in the book. It also reproduces the full summary data about accommodation, including the campgrounds. The 5 mapping blocks are identified with a letter (A to E) and each includes a small insert with a sketch of the whole route highlighting where the relevant block fits. They suffer from quite some tunnel vision, in many places the map won’t show many surrounding features that you will see live.

Section A detail with location sketch insert

The map is printed in high quality, water resistant paper. It has seamless rendering across country borders that remind me mostly to the French IGN topo maps, well known for their good quality. It shows vegetation and bedrock detail and it uses shaded relief. Contour lines are at 20 meter intervals. There’s a UTM grid drawn across the individual maps with UTM coordinates on the map margin.

Trail depiction includes the Timing Points used to break down sections but it doesn’t show the numbered waypoints as used for the route description in the guidebook. Instead it shows 1 km markers that make distance calculation a breeze. There are specific symbols for accommodation, campground and restaurant options. Topographical features like passes, peaks and others are consistently identified by name and so are the villages and hamlets.

The trail depiction includes all the alternatives described in the guidebook together with a small insert with a text summary of what each alternate is about.

There’s no reference to magnetic declination.

Elevation profile detail

The way the map has been loaded with trip data, it’d be workable as a standalone resource for hiking the trail, avoiding carrying the guidebook if you don’t need route description detail or town information. If you still prefer to take the book, you’d probably miss the room taken in the map by the redundant information that could have been used to show more terrain, aiding with navigation and overall enhancing the map experience. It’s always a compromise. As it is, the topo map is still very workable to navigate the route.

What I like

A very compact, thorough and well organized, standalone resource to plan for the trip and hike the trail. This is a popular route and there are lots of resources out there, finding the information should not be a problem but then the issue is often to navigate the info overload, find what you need and make sure you’re not missing anything important. This is where Vertebrate Publishing and author Kingsley Jones have provided some important value.

Possible improvements

I think the map would be better without those bits of background and planning information that you don’t need handy while you hike and that can already be found in the book anyway, provided that the extra room can be put to better use by showing more terrain. While maybe not that important for serious navigation, it’d help with identifying features on the ground, always an interesting exercise when you’re on the trail.

I would also recommend adding magnetic declination data for the sake of completeness in old school fashion.