« Alpine Connections » : Kilian Jornet crosses the Alps by the 4000 peaks

It’s a project that only the Catalan ultra traileur, mountaineer and skier has the secret to. Last year, despite being injured for part of the summer, he completed an ultra-endurance crossing of the Pyrenees (after an attempt to climb Everest to 8,200 meters). Kilian Jornet is no stranger to the Pyrenees, where he grew up, but where he wanted to push his physical and mental machine as far as possible. This is once again the aim of the Alpine Connections project: to go as fast as possible, on foot or by bike, across the Alps, linking peaks over 4000 metres.

No one knows if or when Kilian Jornet will complete his project. It’s late in the season in the Alps to be climbing some of the 82 4000-meter peaks. Some of the 4000+ peaks in the Mont Blanc massif, whether in France or on the Italian side, are very tricky to reach in August. But Kilian Jornet is still a long way off. He has chosen to start his Alpine tour in Switzerland, like most of the rare athletes who take on this challenge.

Kilian Jornet’s first summit was Piz Bernina, on the eastern edge of the Swiss Alps. Swiss climber Ueli Steck took 62 days to link and climb all 82 peaks over 4,000 meters in the Alps. That was in 2015, two years before his death at Nuptse. Twenty years ago, in 2004, the talented French mountaineer Patrick Berhault was killed attempting the same challenge, on the Täschhorn. Jornet has also announced his intention to climb and link the summits solely by muscle power, on foot and by bike.

He explained that he was aiming for long, even extreme stages, in terms of duration and intensity. “I’ll try to tick off as many 4,000s as possible, in the spirit of what I did last year in the Pyrenees, i.e. accumulating hours with a minimum amount of sleep. I’ll sometimes do stages that can go up to 60 hours, interspersed only with a few naps.”

The project is called Alpine Connections. Higher, longer, more technical than what he’s done in his native massif, Jornet’s ambition is to explore extremes, including experimenting on himself with the limits of endurance and sleep deprivation.

After his first summit, Bernina, 29 kms roundtrip, Jornet set off on his bike for the Bernese Alps. With his Willier Verticale bike, Kilian Jornet cycled 210 kms and followed this up with a second Alpine stage, Lauteraarhorn (4042m) and Schreckhorn (4078m), two summits linked by a ridge, then pushing to Finsteraarhorn (4274m). He clocked up 37 kms and 4496 metres of vert. Then comes his third stage.

« I started from Finsteraarhorn Hut after just a few hours of sleep and managed to traverse six 4000-meter peaks. It was a long 99 kilometers with 7890 meters of elevation gain, summiting Gross Grünhorn, Hinter Fiescherhorn, Gross Fiescherhorn, Mönch, Jungfrau, and finally, a long stretch to Aletschhorn. The whole push took me 32 hours and 30 minutes » tells Kilian Jornet.

Then he cycled again, to Saas, in Valais, for stage four.

« After a good night of rest, I was super happy to share this climb with my friend and talented mountaineer Matheo Jacquemoud as we set off at 3:30 in the morning to summit Lagginhorn (4010m) through its South Ridge, and Weissmies (4017m), in a 8-hours push that took us for 30 kilometers and 3381 meters of elevation in the mountains » explains Jornet. 

On this stage, Kilian and Matheo covered 35 kms and 3640 meters of vert. He already climbed twelve 4000 peaks of the Alps.

Will Kilian Jornet continue at this pace? What’s certain is that the Catalan wants to push back the limits of endurance, this time by adding a mountaineering dimension. A kind of new discipline, inspired by Ueli Steck, between ultra trail and mountaineering.

Moreover, Kilian Jornet has announced that it is the subject of a scientific study into the resistance of the human body. On his blog, he wrotes that « in previous studies with Kilian, Dr. Jesús Álvarez, PhD in Biology, observed that cognitive impairment under these stimulus-induced conditions were similar to that of patients with severe brain damage. Analyzing Kilian’s response to this extreme challenge could be revolutionary for science, shedding light on the physiological limits of the human body. The impact threshold will be key to understanding how systemic stress affects cognitive capacity. Let’s analyze the stress levels according to data provided by the COROS (Kilian’s watches sponsor) Training Hub.»

The relentless demands on the body—renal, hepatic, digestive, cognitive, vascular, musculoskeletal—will lead to an extreme struggle for energy. Studying Kilian’s physical performance will be an interesting part of the project.