Blanco

The Parisian geographer, mountaineer, traveller and writer Sylvain Tesson, winner of the International Prize of the Spanish Geographical Society and a reference in travel and adventure literature, in the company of his friend and high mountain guide Daniel du Lac, winner of the 2004 World Block Cup and pioneer mountaineer in extreme routes, made the crossing of the Alps on skis, from Menton, on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, to Trieste, passing through Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. Every year, from 2018 to 2021, at the end of winter, they slid down the snow to "wander in the purity". In Blanco, Tesson recounts this beautiful and powerful four-winter journey, where they taste water with their fingers, the limestone smells of light, read poetry aloud, and marvel at the wonder of lying down in a dry place after a fiendish day. Skiing, sleeping in shelters, the cold, the danger of avalanches, mundane things explained with the sophisticated look of poetry, mixed with a plain sense of humour and accompanied by the voices of the books that are found or transported along the way, "high altitude libraries" from the bottom of the backpacks.