Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB) - clockwise

Tour du Mont Blanc 2022
We headed down to Switzerland from the Netherlands by car to thru-hike the Tour du Mont Blanc. It is a 170km walk we plan to complete the entire circle in 10 or 11 days.

Because we did not start planning this trip until recently, most of the mountain huts are fully booked, we have planned to camp out all of the nights, only if we are lucky, we may be able to get a spot if some one cancels their reservation.

It was meant to be a good training exercise where we thought we had to mostly camp out during the thru-hike. In the future we plan to walk other much longer distance trails which pass through wilderness areas with no indoor lodgings.

The route of the Tour du Mont Blanc often passes through villages and towns, therefore we do not have to carry food and supplies for more than one day at a time.
Based on our past experience hiking long distance trails we tried to minimize our gear as much as possible. We want to test if it is enough or if we need additional items, based on the fact that, on this trip, shops are easily accessible. We feel comfortable in the fact that we can get additional items if we need them.

For this trip we made list of all our gear and weighed every single item. We can share a lot of items with each other, based on that Masako’s backpack is around 8kg, and Erik’s is 10.5kg.

We walked clockwise which is super minority compared to the conventional counter-clockwise way. In the end, we really liked the clockwise route and found some advantages, while we didn't really experience any disadvantages by walking against the regular flow of other hikers.