By Francesca Street, CNN
(CNN) — For Madalin “Cris” Cristea, the danger unfolded in slow motion.
Cris and two fellow hikers were descending Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in the Alps.
The wind was howling, the snow was driving hard, but they were making steady progress toward safety.
Then, through the blur of white, Cris saw one of the other hikers — a British man named James — slip.
“He disappeared in front of me,” Cris tells CNN Travel today. “The image I have of him is he’s on his stomach, literally sliding. Your whole spine lights up with fear.”
A realization hit instantly: James was roped to his adult son, Matt. Both were in peril. If the father went over the edge, the son would almost certainly be dragged down with him.
For a moment, Cris froze. Visibility was bad. The wind drowned out their voices. And the three men were high on Mont Blanc, without a guide and with no one else in sight.
“I was in a state of shock,” Cris says. “I just had this feeling that he was going to die.”
Journey to the Alps
Cris’ journey to this moment began eight months earlier — because of a watch.
On New Year’s Eve 2015, the Romanian-born Londoner was on vacation in Barcelona, Spain with his girlfriend, Viv. The couple were strolling around the streets hand-in-hand, wandering in and out of stores.
“We walked past this Montblanc shop, you know, the one that sells watches and pens, stuff like that,” Cris says.
He peered in the window and saw the watches with their blue faces and shining silver straps. They were beautiful, but way out of his budget.
Half joking, he turned to Viv and said: “Do you reckon if I went and climbed Mont Blanc, they’d give me a discount?”
She laughed and wrapped an arm around him. “Probably not,” she said.
The couple didn’t go inside the store. But back home in London, the conversation kept playing inside Cris’ head. He loved Viv and their life together, but he was feeling lost in the city.
“I come from a very small place, my town is 8,000 to 9,000 people. And moving into London was a bit of a change,” Cris says.
He was in his twenties at the time, working as a lifeguard at a central London gym, but felt unfulfilled and in a rut.
“Maybe I was depressed,” he reflects today. “It was a very low point in my life.”
It didn’t help that it was January in Britain. The weather was miserable. Everything felt gray, uncertain, unhappy.
One cold, wet day on the way to work, Chris thought back to Barcelona. To the Montblanc store. To the conversation with Viv.
An idea suddenly formed: “I’m going to climb Mont Blanc. And I’m going to climb Mont Blanc this year.”
Mission to the mountain
The idea wasn’t entirely out of the blue. That Christmas, Cris’ brother had given him Bear Grylls’ autobiography, “Mud, Sweat and Tears,” and he’d spent the holidays poring over the explorer’s stories of climbing Mount Everest.
But while he had dreamed of climbing big peaks, he had little experience.
“I didn’t have any skills in mountaineering,” he says. “I had only done one mountain before, and that was the highest mountain in Greece.”
Climbing Mount Olympus is impressive, but Cris still felt ill prepared for Mont Blanc.
“The reason I felt inexperienced for Mont Blanc was that I was lacking certain experience elements that I didn’t get on Mount Olympus, which are experience with using crampons, an ice axe and experience with high altitude,” he says.
“I climbed Mount Olympus in summer, so there’s no snow on the mountain, and since the summit is at 2,918m, you’re not there enough to really feel the altitude. If I were to put it in running terms, I’d say that climbing Mount Olympus is like running a 10k; in comparison, Mont B