The route: Up in red, down in green
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Day 1: Approach from Plan de l’Aiguille
The Grand Mullets hut is situated some 30m above the glacier on a prow. You have to scramble up to it (4th class). They've bolted chains and steel bars to the cliff face to make your life easier.
We roped up here and skinned past hole after hole and over snow bridge over snow bridge over to the foot of the corridor beneath the Grand Mullets hut. It was fairly uneventful save me cussing out a frenchman when he skiied up and nearly crossed ropes with me in the very delicate exit from the icefall and crevasse field (we later cussed at each other some more and then made friends at the Mullets hut later in the day).
There’s a rather fun rock scramble from the glacier to the hut which is about 30 meters off the snow on top of the prow. We brought our own dinner with stoves and all to the hut and enjoyed the wonderful views and super sunny day from the deck and went to bed at about 7pm for a 1:30am departure for the summit.
Day 2: Summit Sufferfest
Summit ridge. It's longer than it looks.
The shoulder itself is about 45 degrees the entire way, with a step or two of 60 degrees. If you are lucky (as we were) you might hear chunks of the serac falling off to your left. There were some portions of quite hard ice on this climb as well which made it extra spicey for about 20ft in a couple of spots when you could no longer bury a pick more than a cm. The steps were all pretty well cut in and it didn’t feel sketchy enough to place a screw, so we pushed on with one break for the entire climb. In hindsight, I should have taken another break somewhere and pounded some more food as I started to crash pretty hard when we finally topped out the boot pack and started skinning. We stopped, Kristy took the rescue rope to lighten my load for a bit and I pounded some food and was feeling a lot stronger about an hour later.
Somewhere in my haste and altitude haze I used my ice axe instead of my whippet to switch my dynafit speeds into locked in touring mode. It was now about 6am and balls cold at almost 4000 meters. You can probably guess what happened when I took my aluminum ice axe to the plastic binding piece. One of them I pretty much stuck into touring mode and the other plastic bit was totally shattered. I had to pry the stuck one off my boot and spent about 15 minutes after we were done skinning trying to fix the shattered one so it was skiiable. Oops. Fortunately from this point near the Vallot hut, the route is a boot pack anyhow.
We reached the Vallot hut and Kristy unroped, dropped her crampons and decided not to go to the summit. So Tim and I ditched our skis here and short roped for the 600m ascent to the summit. It was now 7:20 and we had about 2 hours to ascend the ridgeline to the summit. The ridgeline is exceedingly aesthetic and drops off either mildly or steeply on either side as you crampon your way up and across to the summit. About halfway there, we were passed by a soloist. Kristy had decided to head to the summit and was soloing, but refused our offer to rope up with her at this point, and hauled ass past us to the summit a good 10 minutes before we arrived. We tagged a lightly windy but brutally cold summit and huddled up. I fueled up a bit with the last of my brownie, sandwich, and a slice of camembert (would the summit of mont blanc be complete without a piece of tasty brie?). We hit the summit at pretty much 930am on the dot, right on time! After a 15 minute break and some summit shots, we cruised our way back to the Vallot hut for the ski down.
Down: Monster Crevasses with a side of Seracs
Monster crevasse crossings
The seracs on the normal route are ENORMOUS and you have to walk/slip/curse your way through debris fields of enormous blocks of ice boulders to make your way past the seracs. I had imagined you could ski quickly under the seracs to limit your time in the danger zone. Really though, there is so much debris it’s like somebody smashed an ice rink and lightly covered it in snow; not fast at all. The ski out from that was fairly straightforward skiing on the side of the ridgeline overlooking the broken up bosson glacier. There were some rather hairy sections of ice lightly covered in snow though which made for some sketchy slipping and side slipping to gain more skiiable ground. Yeesh.
Tim and I arrived back to the Mullets hut to grab the rest of our gear to find Kristy had taken the headstart to heat up the leftover food and melt snow for a bunch more water for our ski out. We did end up leaving rather late (2pm, much later than suggested) for a slushy & scary ski out the lower bosson glacier. My tip for you on this ski out is to keep up your speed on the flats. There are holes, but hopefully you remember them from the ski up, or like me, you just have enough speed to clear the smaller ones 
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All in all a great, big, grueling adventure in ski mountaineering.
Summit baby! Fucking cold too.
