The big gamble factor, of course, is the weather. Extreme cold and destabilizing gusts of 100 km/h are not uncommon. Storms materialize literally out of thin air in a matter of minutes. Insufficient acclimatization (at least three nights at 2,500 m are recommended), a poor night's sleep at the noisy refuge, a lost glove or a cracked lens in glacier glasses can be enough to transform success into failure or worse. For all that, Mont Blanc via the normal route has long been disdained by experienced climbers.

Local crystal hunter Jacques Balmat and local physician Michel-Gabriel Paccard completed the first ascent in 1786. They claimed the "substantial" reward offered by Geneva physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure that had languished unclaimed for more than 25 years. Then the dam broke: by 1808 Balmat got to the top with his 14-year-old son and a hearty local serving girl, Marie Paradis. After Waterloo, the English came in ever greater numbers, and by the second half of the century, in droves. One of the great British alpinists of the 19th century, Albert Mummery, said that climbing Mont Blanc was "an occupation that calls to mind the treadmill on which British convicts are made to work nonstop." His gifted compatriots were already looking for tougher challenges: Edward Whymper, the legendary lion of 19th century alpinists, failed seven times before he reached the summit of the Matterhorn in 1865, and four in his party died on the way down.

Mountaineering has a harder edge than most popular sports: if you miss a putt, you're not going to lose a toe to frostbite, let alone plummet screaming to your death. Yet suffering itself surely isn't the point, nor is risk. "You do it because you love the mountains," says Profit, whose exploits have included scrambles up the north faces of the Matterhorn, the Eiger and the Grandes Jorasses in 24 hours in 1988, and three years later a sublime two-man climb of Nepal's 8,611-m K2. "Risk is everywhere; the point is to minimize it."

Still, for most of us, mountaineering brings a peculiarly displaced pleasure: you suffer, mightily at times, in order to reach the summit or the refuge or the top of a slope; it is then, sweetened by the effort, that the payoff comes. Most of humanity would not subject itself to this: why strain and risk falling or frostbite when you can take a chairlift and get the same stunning views? But the views aren't the same, and the pleasure of having gotten there on your own steam is genuine—eventually.

We were up at 2 a.m. like everyone else, but Christophe again wasn't in a hurry. Another touch of "le style anglais," or simply a recognition that at my pace, we'd be getting passed by young enthusiasts all the way up? When everyone else was gone we put on our gear and started up the mountain. Far below to the northwest we could see the glow of Geneva; to the southeast a delicate string of headlamps zigzagged to daunting heights up the looming slope of the Dôme du Goûter. The prospect of dawn advanced slowly as we climbed, but not enough to warm the frigid air or calm the 50-km/h winds. The gusts became brutal across the tortured plain at the top of the Dôme, where I was knocked flat.

We still had about 300 m of climbing to do as we ascended the Bosses Ridge, with the sun slowly rising to tint everything first pink and then an otherworldly orange. A lone Austrian climber began to shadow us, showing every bit as much exhaustion as I did (which I shamefully found heartening). The slope seemed to rise forever, but now we could sense success. The final ridge rises gently, disappearing into a fine point in the early morning light. "It's a gift that the final ridge is like this," said Christophe. "People realize they're going to make it."

And so we made it. It must have been 8:30 a.m. (my watch, like the tube to my water bag, had long since frozen)—very late for the purists, many of whom had passed us going back down. There were shoulder claps and heartfelt congratulations among Christophe, the indefatigable photographer Pascal Tournaire and myself. I felt an immense relief—erroneous, as it turned out, since the climb down was murder—that from here on in there would be no more screaming lungs or apologetic requests to "faire une pause d'une petite seconde." The wind and cold were biting but the view was crystalline: all the way south to Italy's 4,061-m Gran Paradiso; to the north and east the Grandes Jorasses and the whole storied panorama of the French Alps, and in the distance the Matterhorn in Switzerland—a world without end of glaciers and mountains.

It was a moment of marvel rather than reflection, but wasn't being here at the summit the point of all this? Years ago a hiking partner had venomously called me "destination oriented"—definitely not cool in a world where the enlightened supposedly know that der Weg ist das Ziel (the way is the goal). Okay, I plead guilty. Call me a peak-bagger, a misguided apostle of achievement, whatever—I'd done what I set out to do. Later, after we'd traversed two other mountains and climbed a third and my knee had seized up in the cramped gondola on the last leg down, I realized there was more to it than that. I'd gone to my limit, and now it's higher than it was before. There's nothing like a mountain to make that happen.