My photos from a trip inside the Mer Du Glace.

The entrance

Translucent ice

Refracted light

Solid glacier ice

A melted hole

The glacier at this point is covered in a layer of rock

Looking up the Mer Du Glace

One of the walks we went on started from Le Tour and went over the Aiguillette des Possettes after a brief wander into Switzerland. The weather was excellent, being neither too hot nor too cold, clear and sunny all day. The terrain was fairly easy to walk over too. Here’s today’s selection from a much larger set.

The summit

Mont Blanc through the trees

A cairn

The Swiss border

Mont Blanc from Le Tour

Mont Blanc

Snagged from the Telegraph…

A helicopter searching the slopes of Mont-Blanc has been unable to trace the climbers - five Austrian and three Swiss – who were swept away by the avalanche at 3am on Sunday on western Europe’s highest peak.

The climbers were scaling the Mont-Blanc du Tacul - one of the peaks in the range - in perfect weather conditions, but were suddenly subjected to what one mountain guide described as “a scene from the apocalypse”

(more…)

Since I have taken a lot of photos, I’m going to be spending the next few days picking out the best and displaying them here.

To begin, here are photos from my cable car trip up the Aiguille Du Midi

The lower viewing platform

The summit of the Aiguille Du Midi

Hanging Icicles

Looking down towards Chamonix

The Aiguille Du Midi cablecar station

Vertigo

This is nuts. We go home tomorrow, back to merry old Englandshire in an EasyJet flying toothpaste tube/cattle transporter. Our flight leaves at 4pm, but air travel tradition dictates we arrive two hours early for check in (a thirty second process, naturally). To make things even more tedious, our bus from Chamonix leaves at 7am - yes, in order to arrive ready for the flight that leaves at 4pm, I have to leave at 7 in the morning. And naturally that means waking up at 6am.

And some people actually go travelling for fun.

After last night’s torrential downpour we woke this morning to thick cloud covering the valley. The sun was doing its best to burn it off, but by 10am it was still there (and still is now) so rather than doing a high level walk, we chose to do a low one.

After spending half an hour watching people climbing on the rocks just down the road, we ambled along the forest paths towards Les Houches, a village at the start of the Chamonix valley. The walk was fairly sedate, mostly flat and went through the forest on the side of the valley, which caused my GPS some trouble, as can be seen from the track.

Today’s GPS log is, again, included after the break, and once again LJ users should click the title to see it correctly.

(more…)

Once again the French have excelled themselves at turning an otherwise hazardous, death creating force of nature into a mere tourist attraction. And a very cool one at that. The Mer De Glace is a glacier that runs out of the mountains and into Chamonix, where it unceremoniously melts into the hillside. For a the not too bad sum of €21 you can buy a ticket to ride the Montenvers Railway, then catch a télécabine down to the Mer De Glace itself and … go inside it.

Yes, you can go inside the glacier, not just touch it from behind a safety fence, or look at it from a distance of 100m. You can actually walk around inside it. And not content with just letting you walk around a carved tunnel they even went to the effort of carving out some pretty sculptures and fitting lights to refract off them.

It was really good, I have nearly filled my memory card in my camera with stuff from it.

No GPS route for today, it’s hard to get a fix under ten metres of solid ice

Once again the weather in the Chamonix valley was excellent. Had we chosen today to ride the Aiguille Du Midi cable car, we would have been able to see right into Italy and Switzerland. Instead, we chose to walk into Switzerland briefly from the top end of the Chamonix valley.

After catching the sardine can bus up to Le Tour me and my dad started the long, but easy walk up to the pass between France and Switzerland, where there is a cafe and bunkhouse. In the Alpine style, we could have caught a telecabin (small cable car) and then a chair lift to the top, but instead used our legs and saved some money. A small group of Americans who were doing the Chamonix - Zermatt route started off by first catching the bus from Chamonix and then the cable cars to the Swiss border. No doubt they’ve now ordered the helicopter to take them down again.

Today’s GPS map included after the break. LJ readers, click the title as usual.

(more…)

Today we went to 3,800 metres to the top of the Aiguille Du Midi. Up there the air was noticeably thinner and the temperature below freezing. I was quite glad I’d decided to take my padded jacket and gloves. The people making their way across the glacier towards Italy seemed quite small.

How did we manage this feat of mountaineering in such a seemingly simple manner? Well it’s all thanks to some very crazy people in the 50s who decided it’d be great to build a cable car run to the summit. Yes, for the small sum of €38 you and your granny can catch a cable car to 3,000m - a height where full on cold weather clothing, crevasse rescue gear and a pretty damn good overall fitness level is usually the minimum requirement for not becoming dead.

Yeah the cable car takes the piss and makes dangerous scenery seem safe and just like a cold winter’s day, but it’s also nice to take a short cut occasionally and go somewhere that ordinarily you’d not be able to visit.

The people who built the cable car originally were utterly insane. There’s a gallery showing how it was built. We went up in an enclosed metal box secured to a very thick and sturdy steel cable. The original builders first had to get the cable to the top by dragging it, and then they simply climbed up it, or rode little open-air carts that were nothing more than a wheel bolted to a plank of wood.

Below you should be able to see the readouts from my GPS. It went somewhat nuts when first powered on, suddenly being transported 3km into the sky must mess with its calculations slightly. I also didn’t go for a walk across the tops of the mountains like it shows. Just look at the maximum height, that’s the only interesting part.

Livejournal readers, click the title.

Aguille Du Midi

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

Today me and my dad went for a walk to Lac Blanc. We caught the bus up the Chamonix valley and then the téléphérique back down afterwards. I have four minutes of stomach churning cable car action, including disturbed passengers as the car lurched over its pylons - there’s a brief second where it feels like the car has come off its cable, it’s quite a jolt if you’re not expecting it.

All day we had excellent sunny weather, but were high enough that it was cool and breezy, with amazing views of Mont Blanc. Part of the route has some dodgy looking iron ladders to climb which was fun and we encountered some Chamois who didn’t need ladder at all, instead they simply ran up the rocks making our attempts look quite feeble.

Lac Blanc

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging