Hillary Gerardi’s Vertical Life

by Matt Hart

^{Top photo: Kim Strom}

“You’re comfortable scrambling slabs unroped?” read the text from American athlete Hillary Gerardi.

I gave it a thumbs up, wondering what I might be getting myself into with the newly crowned French Mountain Running National Champion. Two days earlier, I’d watched her blast off the start line of the Courmayeur Mont Blanc double VK—a 7-mile race with 7,500 vertical feet of gain that ends when you climb over the Skyway Gondola guardrail atop Mont Blanc’s Italian flank. The joke about this “running” course is that there’s “pretty much no running involved.” That was certainly true for me, but Hillary cruised to second place in an event she hadn’t specifically targeted, showcasing the hard-earned abilities that make her a serious contender for the upcoming World Mountain Running Championships.

So how did an American-born athlete become the French National Mountain Running Champion? After nearly a decade of top performances on the international scene, Hillary retired from the skyrunning circuit, and set her sights on a new, longer challenge—the World Championships of Mountain Running. 

Hillary lives in the Chamonix Valley but is originally from Vermont, so she naturally looked to represent the United States, but the onerous travel to qualify at a US race and a “lukewarm” response to the prospect of qualifying on resume alone had her looking to her adopted country for opportunity. Having just received her French citizenship, Hillary headed to the French Trail National race on July 17, eager to see if she could gain a spot on the national team. After a 72 km (45 miles) battle with more than 16,000 feet of vertical gain, she passed the front-runner with just a few miles left and went on to win the race. 

A run / environmental science master class with Hillary

We met in the northern part of Chamonix, at the Les Praz bus stop, where she stashed her bike, and ran through the Le Bois forest to the foot of the Rocher des Mottets. Hillary has a mountain guide’s sensibility, and as we ascend the 4th class rock scramble she suggests holds and tactics for certain sections of rock that I might find tricky. As we move steadily upward, she is light, fast, and competent. She is one of the best mountain athletes on earth. 

What I didn’t expect was that to spend time with Hillary is to have access to a master class in applied environmental science. As we ascended through the forest, Hillary—at home on the rock—began pointing out the unfolding climate drama gripping the valley she now calls home.

A few hundred feet into our uphill she points out a 2 millimeter wide burrowed path marking on a spruce tree. ”You see all these designs and tracks?” she says. “That’s all European bark beetles. It’s a terribly invasive species that is killing lots of trees.” 

Weakened by drought and a warming planet, the trees have become increasingly susceptible to infestation. These dying stands have forced trail closures around Chamonix and accelerated the degradation of the forest ecosystem. Hillary points to a stand of trees across the valley, where a clustered brown patch mars the sea of green—evidence of a bark beetle attack. The larvae bore tunnels through the tree’s phloem, a vital layer that transports nutrients, effectively starving each tree. The trees die standing upright, then topple with the next strong wind. This infested specimen in our path will likely perish within weeks. 

Fifteen hundred feet into our climb, the trail opens to what was once a commanding view of the Mer de Glace. The glacier has retreated so far upslope that it’s completely invisible, leaving only the massive U-shaped valley it carved over millennia—a geological ghost story written in stone. We pause at the overlook, the absence more striking than any presence could be.

Hillary’s Ascent

Hillary’s love for mountain challenges began in the White Mountains of New England on the east coast of the United States. While on summer break from her classes at Middlebury College, she scored a coveted position as a “hut kid,” a job in which you live in and manage one of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s mountain huts. It’s a culture that appreciates those who can mule heavy loads fast, and one that leaves you in the mountains with some free time to explore the other peaks and huts around you. It’s how many mountain-running champions are born, Katie Schide and Jeff Colt among them.

After graduating from Middlebury College in Vermont, Hillary moved with her boyfriend, now husband, Brad Carlson to Grenoble. To this point Hillary had only competed in one trail race, the Great Adirondack Trail Run. And even though she won the race, she wasn’t totally sold on trail running, yet. For a time they both worked at the Research Centre for Alpine Ecosystems, the Crea Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, where she developed a deeper understanding of the environmental issues the Alps (and our planet) are contending with. Brad was also pursuing the French mountain-guide path and had put together a list of ski objectives to tick off. 

Skiing with Brad on the slopes of Mont Blanc one winter day in 2012, Hillary had an accident that would change the trajectory of her life. On her second turn in a steep couloir, her ski popped off. Picking up speed, her slide quickly became an uncontrolled 450 meter (1,500 foot) ragdoll down the steep slopes. Bouncing off the snow every 50 meters she went airborne and flew over the heads of her ski partners. Brad saw her disappear out of sight, fearing the worst. When she finally came to a stop, in a bergschrund, she was covered in blood, had holes in her helmet, a few large bruises, and some melted Gore-tex, but was otherwise unharmed. One of her PGHM rescue team members told her, “A fall like this never ends in nothing.” 

“It was actually a really terrible winter, I also got buried in an avalanche earlier that season,” she said. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m doing some obviously dangerous things and I need to reign this in.’” 

It was Brad who reminded Hillary of her early trail-running success and suggested she give the sport another try. What followed was a decade of top performances in some of the hardest mountain races our sport has to offer. In 2018 Hillary won the Tromso Skyrace and was the overall Skyrunner World Series champion. In 2021 she won the Marathon du Mont-Blanc 90K. A dialed-back version of ski mountaineering also factored in, with a Fastest Known Time (FKT) on the Chamonix to Zermatt Haute Route ski traverse in 2021. And in 2022 Hillary took first place and broke the course record at what some consider the most technical Skyrunning race in the world, Trofeo Kima in Italy. 

On June 17, 2023 Hillary reached international acclaim by setting the Fastest Known Time up and down Mont Blanc, the tallest peak in Europe. Climate change has made the ascent of Mont Blanc more difficult due to new risks of serac fall from permafrost melt. With an all-female team helping her, the Mont Blanc FKT was a crowning achievement of a life in the French Alps. 

Last year, at 37, Hillary announced her retirement from skyrunning, posting that she’s “shifting format to slightly longer races.” Privately, however, she was having trouble finding the motivation to continue to push her body to its limits.  

She employed a mental preparation trainer, a professional, but not a trained psychologist. “There is no equivalent profession in America,” she said, “but she helped me figure out that I am still really psyched to compete.” 

In preparation for the French Long Distance Trail Running Championship in Val d’Isere, in June, Hillary trained to replace negative thoughts with action. Listing her many skills, she was coached to think of them as ingredients in a recipe, certain recipes (or race situations) requiring different ingredients. “Sometimes you don’t have all the ingredients that you want but you can use a different ingredient,” she told me. “I’m fresh out of power right now, but can I substitute it with cadence, for instance.” 

She began the race with an intention for each section of the race. For the first 45 of 72k, Hillary kept herself from racing too hard until the base of the last big climb. At this point in the event, she was in third place, 3 minutes behind second, and 14 minutes behind the leader. 

“I just thought, ‘You wanted to test yourself and now is the time to do that. If you don’t do it now you’ll always wonder.’” Charging through the field, she passed the second and then the first place athletes. Now she began to envision herself as a dog playing tug-of-war for a toy, growling, and shaking her head back-and-forth. “This is your toy!” she thought to herself, and she wasn’t giving it up. 

The mental preparation paid off. After 9 hours and 25 minutes of racing, Hillary crossed the finish line first, raised the finishing tape over her head and collapsed to her knees, overcome with emotion. The crowd roared. And on Saturday, September 27, 2025 Hillary will get a chance to compete against the best in the world, representing France in the long-trail event at the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships (WMTRC) in Canfranc-Pirineos, Spain.

…

Above us, the wooden terrace of la Buvette des Mottets clings to the ridgeline, one of those improbable mountainside refuges that dot the French Alps. Hillary moves with the easy familiarity of someone who belongs here, greeting the staff in fluent French while I catch my breath and marvel at how she’s barely winded after our 1,500-foot scramble.

---

---