5 years ago, she was on the bunny slope. Now this Salt Lake City woman is setting a record on one of Europe’s deadliest mountains.

Her skis, strapped to one side of her backpack, cut into Anna DeMonte’s back as she ran on wobbly legs through the French village of Chamonix. She couldn’t afford to stop to adjust them. She had to get to the church on time.

When DeMonte finally climbed the steps of the 18th century stone chapel in the center of town it was just shy of 1:15 p.m. on Wednesday, June 5. She was late, but there was still reason to celebrate.

“I wouldn’t say I stumbled into the church,” DeMonte said, “but I wasn’t looking like [Olympic sprinter] Sha’Carri Richardson.”

Five years earlier, when she moved to Utah, DeMonte couldn’t make a turn on a bunny slope. She also had no mountaineering skills to speak of. Yet before dawn that June morning earlier this year, DeMonte had set off to summit Mont Blanc, which at 15,772 feet is the highest mountain in Western Europe and also one of the most dangerous. Her return to Eglise St. Michel that afternoon meant she had successfully laid down the fastest known time for a woman to ski the peak. In addition to skinning up and skiing down, though, the 15-mile Par les Grand Mulets route she took to the summit required ice climbing, boot-packing, glacier crossings and running. And DeMonte did it all without help.

“It was for me, personally,” DeMonte said, “kind of like a culmination of my time since I’ve lived in Utah.”

Still, DeMonte struggles to call the achievement a success. Fastest Known Times, or FKTs, have become a popular measuring stick for endurance athletes, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, but they’re notoriously difficult to compare. That day, DeMonte had been chasing the overall women’s record for the Chamonix route, set in 2023 by Hilary Gerardi. In that endeavor, DeMonte’s time of 7 hours, 29 minutes came up four minutes short.

Yet Gerardi completed the route on foot as part of a run, not on skis, and she had help. So DeMonte’s time would have been a women’s unsupported ski record no matter how fast or slow she went, which was a blessing and a curse.

“It was respectable, and it was fast and I’m proud of it,” DeMonte, 29, said of her time. “But there is a little part of me that’s like, ‘I wish there were a long list, because maybe my ego would feel better.’”

The comparable best men’s ski time round trip from Chamonix, for the record, is 4:59:50, set by DeMonte’s partner, Jack Kuenzle, on the same day she made her attempt. The best overall time is the 4:57:44 laid down by renowned mountaineer Kilian Jornet in 2013.

The lack of documented women’s FKTs on the peak — which was first climbed in the late 1700s and first climbed by a woman, Marie Paradis, in 1808 — initially deterred DeMonte. Eventually, though, it’s what drew her to the challenge.

“Probably the most important factor for me was just that there were so many men that had recorded times of skiing it or doing it fast for time, and I really just didn’t know why there weren’t many women on the list,” DeMonte said. “It was just like, ‘Hey, I think there should be more, because we have a spot here, too.”

She said she doesn’t feel as though women are discouraged from attempting FKTs on Mont Blanc, just that not many had tried. With each of her 11 exploratory ascents between February and June, however, DeMonte said she felt more galvanized to lay down some kind of marker for other women to chase.

Including her future self.

What is the allure of the FKT?

Every few hours, someone around the world attempts to set a new FKT.

According to the website FastestKnownTime.com, which tracks and verifies efforts, more than 20 attempts were laid down over the Labor Day weekend. Among them was a record on the Colorado Trail, one of the most popular FKT challenges, and the 51-mile Korona Ziemi Jaśliskiej loop on the border between Slovakia and Poland. In late September, Tara Dower of Virginia set the FKT for the 2,189-mile Appalachian Trail. She beat the record, held by a Belgian man named Karel Sabbe, by 13 hours in part because during her 54-mile days she would occasionally lay down in the middle of the trail to catch a 90-second “dirt nap.”

Those making attempts must submit GPS tracking of their route, often via a Strava report, and can document the cause of any variations made during the effort. They are encouraged to corroborate that data with a secondary method of tracking their time and route, such as a satellite phone.

About once a week, a group of volunteers reviews submissions from their region. Based on a variety of criteria, including whether the person ran a complete route or just a Strava segment, they decide whether to deem it an FKT. Those who wage successful attempts don’t receive any financial benefit, except potentially from their sponsors. They don’t even get a certificate, said Allison Mercer, the director of community partnerships for FastestKnownTime.com. All they get is bragging rights.

“Once you set an FKT,” Mercer said, “it’s like setting a precedent.”

Mercer said when the website was founded in 1999, most attempts were on routes found in Western states — like the Colorado Trail — and on the West and East coasts. Of course, in those days, when GPS wasn’t as prevalent, athletes were on the honor system. They still are, in some ways, Mercer said.

When the FKT movement caught fire during the COVID-19 pandemic, while many races were canceled, it spread internationally. With so many submissions coming in, Mercer said, the Outside.com-owned but mostly volunteer-run website doesn’t have the resources to verify the legitimacy of a claim that a race was unsupported (athletes carry everything they need) as opposed to self-supported (athletes stash water bottles along the route, for example).

“If you have to cheat,” Mercer said, “that’s on you.”

Within the endurance community, though, more respect is typically bestowed upon an unsupported effort than a supported or self-supported one. That’s why Kuenzle suggested DeMonte’s effort should be the one of record for women on the round-trip route from Chamonix to Mont Blanc.

Gerardi not only had help making the climbs on the Grand Mulets route, he pointed out, but she did it in the summer. DeMonte, meanwhile, faced one of the world’s most unforgiving mountains during the spring melt all on her own. Part of the trek included passing under a serac — a column of glacial ice — that DeMonte said is so formidable she won’t risk stopping under it to snap a photo.

A similar serac fell from a different part of Mont Blanc in August, triggering an avalanche that killed one climber and injured four others.

“There’s no comparison in my mind,” Kuenzle said. “I can tell you how painful it was to carry the skis and have them slide around and switch them out. I think Anna’s time is definitely the strongest.”

“I’m proud,” Kuenzle added, “that she did it in good style and also very safe.”

Europe’s most dangerous mountain

Mont Blanc generally is not considered especially technical, yet it’s one of the deadliest mountains in the world.

Five climbers from three parties died over a single weekend last month. That is in addition to a total of four deaths on the mountain in August, according to TheLocal.com. In 2022, the BBC reported that accidents had become so frequent that the mayor of Saint-Gervais in France had proposed requiring climbers to make a deposit of 15,000 euros to cover rescue and funeral costs.

Much of the danger in recent years has been attributed to climate change. Mayor Jean-Marc Peillex attributed increased rockfall to a heat wave. In addition, the melting of glaciers has made some crossings less stable — something DeMonte said she noticed during her 11 summits between her and Kuenzle’s arrival in Chamonix in February and her official FKT attempt in June.

“It’s inherently dangerous,” she said. “We stayed at the hut on the mountain, the Grand Mulets hut, and … what sounded like thunder became a very common sound. It was the sound of seracs falling all the time.”

In addition to her job in the tech industry, DeMonte is a sponsored trail runner for RAB and Scott. She easily could have waited for summer to run the route, but her heart was set on skiing it.

She almost didn’t have a choice. After waiting nearly two months for good weather, DeMonte said she thinks she and Kuenzle — who left after DeMonte for his own FKT ski attempt — finally found an opening during the last window in which skiing would be possible.

“We agonized over picking a day,” she said. “Just because the longer we waited into June, the more crevasses open up, the more dangerous it is. But we also needed a clear day to be safe as well, and there were just so few options.”

Even on the day they eventually picked, clouds blocked out the morning sun, which kept the snow on the mountain frozen like a block of ice. DeMonte ran with her skis on her back to the tundra line, then switched into a pair of lightweight ski mountaineering boots. She attached climbing skins to her skinny skis and began her uphill ascent. For a person seeking speed, though, it was agonizingly slow treading. Each step forward would end with her sliding three-fourths of a step back down.

At one point, the edges of her skis completely betrayed her and she fell about 20 feet down a steep incline. Worse, she had to slide further down to collect the ski pole she’d lost in the tumble.

She kept telling herself it had to get better, but she felt the seconds also slipping away.

“I knew on my watch, this is not as fast as could be going right now. It was kind of a blow to the head space,” DeMonte said. “But I was also like, ‘No, we’ve prepared so much for this. Let’s just finish it.’ It’s fun to push your body and your mind.”

Eventually, DeMonte reached the summit, but she had no time to take in the view. Instead, she ripped the skins off her skinny mountaineering skis, switched her bindings to downhill mode and dropped in.

From bunny slopes to big mountains

Five years ago, DeMonte moved to Salt Lake City to reconstruct her life.

A five-star recruit in swimming coming out of high school in Ann Arbor, Mich., she’d attended Tennessee, where she twice qualified for the NCAA championships. DeMonte said the “cutthroat” nature of swimming at the elite level ruined competition for her. She never wanted to race again.

She couldn’t anyway. Just before she arrived in Utah, DeMonte had undergone surgery to repair a spinal injury. For her first few weeks in the Wasatch Mountains, she couldn’t even walk. Plus, the pandemic had canceled most races. So when she could move again, she decided she wanted to ski.

“I saw other people enjoying skiing and I was barely able to turn,” she recalled. “And I got kind of obsessive, like I want to enjoy it, too. So I would go out on days even when the snow was terrible. Just every day. And it was cool because I learned a lot because … if you’re skiing in the worst snow, you improve quickly.”

Climbing was the same way. She said she didn’t know routes at the climbing gym were color coded. But through mountaineering classes at the University of Utah and with the help of mentors and a healthy dose of determination, she began working her way through increasingly technical projects.

Then this winter, while driving with Kuenzle through France after she attended a work conference there, Mont Blanc caught her eye and captured her imagination.

Getting to the top took months of recognizance and planning and doubting and believing. It took hours of skinning and sliding and climbing and side-stepping and boot-packing. But DeMonte got to the summit just in time.

“The best part was by the time I got to the top, the sun was out and the ice had softened a lot. It was just me and my skis and I was just laughing the whole time,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be as fast as I possibly could go, but I knew it would be a good time.”

Where the snow turned to dirt at the bottom of the slope, DeMonte quickly switched out her boots for trail shoes, bungeed her skis to her backpack and forced her fatigued legs to run.

DeMonte knows she can go even faster. Ultimately, though, she made it to the church on time — the fastest known time, in fact.