Mont Blanc

[poliphilo]

Ruth had this dream of riding a cable car to the top of Mont Blanc- or as close as you can get- and drinking chocolate there. So we did what we could to realise it. To be honest it was a bit of a nightmare. The cable car was crowded and swayed like a ship and by the time we emerged on the pinnacle of L'Aigulle du Midi- and it really is a pinnacle- like something on the borders of Mordor- we were suffering from a combination of altitude sickness and sea-sickness which was seriously weird and unpleasant. I don't know if there was hot chocolate on offer- but if there was it was just about the last thing any of us would have wanted to contemplate- and the posh restaurant was closed. Ailz and I made a dizzy tour of the souvenir shop- which sells crud- and came down again on the next available car. Ruth and Matt lasted half an hour longer- but only- we learned later-  because Ruth was initially too giddy to move.  I would like to have some pictures to show you of the view from the summit, but it was blowing hard and cold on the observation platforms and I was afraid of losing my hat. At the bottom of the mountain- in the building housing the cable car- there's a nice, clean, little cafeteria to recover in. I had rabbit pie and frozen raspberry mousse- and I'll tell you what- it's almost impossible to get a really bad meal in France.
 
A few mountains have highly distinctive profiles- the Eiger for instance and the Matterhorn. Mont Blanc isn't one of them. The last of these photos certainly shows Mt Blanc. I'm not sure about the others.  

 







And here are my dauntless companions.....

Comments

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

That bit where the cable car feels like it's slamming into the rock just before you dock is the part that got me feeling really sick.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's really horrid.

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

I really like the shot of the mountain with the sweep of cloud over it.

I need to visit France one day.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That cloud was a gift.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful photo the third one is. That swirl of cloud!

In the Picos de Europa in northern Spain we rode the cable car to the top. Manolo got really ill just thinking we were suspended that high by a mere steel cable and I was fascinated to see the mountain goats on the peaks below us. But yes, it IS a bit of a weird experience.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've been on cable cars before- and never really turned a hair. I think this one must have gone a lot higher than those other ones.

Or maybe it's just that I'm older.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I like the third mountain pic especially. Lovely snow!

mont blanc

[nashey1888.livejournal.com]

Hello Tony

Jenny tells me you would like to know the names of the mountains you photographed. Picture 1 - The mountain range is the Aravis, and the specific peaks are the L'Aiguille and La Balme. The ski resorts of La Clusaz and Le Grand Bornand (unseen) are beneath them. Picture 2 is Mont Joly. There's an unseen valley between the camera and the mountain which has the ski resort of Megeve in it, and the Joly is one of the peaks that forms the Megeve ski area. Picture 3 - the very left edge of the photo is the right front edge of the Drus. This is a famous climbing mountain where real experts climb. There is a "small" scar on the Drus. This is where there was a huge 1500 cubic metre rockfall without warning in 1997, and remarkably for such a popular climbing mountain, nobody was on it at the time. Picture 4 is of course Mont Blanc. The bobbly bits of snow in the foreground is the start of the huge Bossons glacier that flowed right the way down to the valley floor before it started retreating rapidly in the 19th century. Even by the 1880's, an amazing Jules Verne-like ice-cave which used to form within the glacier each winter had stopped forming due to the ice retreating. It now takes a couple of hours to walk from the valley floor to the tip of the glacier, and along the way you see the huge gouge in the earth that was once the glacier. It's like looking at a very long, deep, rectangular quarry. Picture 7 of th elake with a mountain ridge in the background - this is the back massif of the Aravis, the front of which you see in picture 1. Very different looking from the front view from Chamonix.

Re: mont blanc

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Ian. I want to post some of these pictures on wikipedia commons- where labels like "pretty mountains somewhere in the alps" just won't do. Now I can give them their proper names and appear to know what I'm talking about.

I'd love to have seen that ice cave......