A View for the Ages
In a previous post, I described my family’s mutigenerational attachment to math, travel — and mountains. I wrote about Pikes Peak in Colorado, a family favorite for more than a hundred years, which my husband Tony and I (re)visited during our stay this summer in Denver. More striking than the panorama from the top, I later learned, were the stories that made Pikes Peak “American’s Mountain.”
I long favored, though, a different mountain, a continent away: Mont Blanc.
When I was eleven, my family spent a year in Geneva, Switzerland. I imagined myself skiing to school — instead of taking a 45-minute tram ride, at the crack of dawn, to an international school on the other side of town. But my biggest dream was to see Mont Blanc, the iconic queen of the Alps. I’d learned about it from watching old movie clips of figure skater Sonja Henie, competing at age 11 (my age then) at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, which lies at the base of the mountain. Note: I also dreamed of being a figure skater.
One November morning in 1958, my briefly-Swiss family packed into our Plymouth station wagon, which had crossed the Atlantic with us that summer, and headed to Chamonix, 50 miles from Geneva. At Chamonix, we boarded the Aiguille du Midi cable car — “Needle at Midday” in French — for the 20-minute ascent to 12,600 feet, where the summit of Mont Blanc stood within arm’s reach. Then as now, the Téléphérique de l’Aiguille du Midi held the title of being the world’s highest vertical ascent cable car.
The Michelin guidebook, which my mother read to us enroute, promised a stunning view from the top. Mine ended up less than stunning. As we exited the Aiguille du Midi cable car and headed down an icy trail to an extremely exposed overlook — this was three years after the cable car was built — I slipped and fainted from the altitude. I woke up on my hands and knees with only a rope separating me from the abyss below. I don’t remember the view, but I talked about the experience for months.
Almost 40 years later, as part of a summer trip across Europe, I commandeered my husband and two sons (then 14 and 9 years old) to join me in another ascent of the Aiguille du Midi.
“It’s the closest thing to being on the top of the world,” I assured them.
The adventure began incongruously — in a traffic jam at the entrance to the Mont Blanc Tunnel, which since 1965 has linked the Italian side of this Alpine massif to the French. Carl and Dan, ensconced in the back seat, couldn’t take their eyes off the nude male passenger in the truck behind us. “Look at that!” they kept squealing to one another.
Leaving the burlesque behind, we arrived in Chamonix and found our place in the next cable car headed to the Aiguille du Midi. Disinclined towards heights, Carl held his breath as we headed up and up, the car suspended before steep vertical rocks and, as it passed over supporting pylons, swinging in space. But the view from the 360-degree observation deck at the top — an unquestionable improvement from the icy overlook with a rope I remembered forty years before — took his and our breath away. Among the phalanx of mountains in every direction, the Matterhorn, too, raised its head.
Three weeks ago, the Mont Blanc massif once again entered my life, this time from the Italian side. (The French will tell you that Mont Blanc is all theirs. The Italians, who call it Monte Bianco, will tell you not so fast: half belongs to Italy. The issue of ownership has been debated since the French Revolution.)
As part of a ten-day trip this September to Italy to visit Tony’s three older sisters who live there, we spent four days with his niece Annarita exploring Val D’Aosta, 115 miles northwest of Milan — a lush, beguiling valley lined with steep mountains on both sides and more than 75 winding roads from the valley floor to trails, lakes, tiny villages, and secluded bar-ristorantes above. It is a region with the lowest population density in all of Italy; there are few tourists outside its fancy ski mecca, Courmayeur, at the valley’s end.
In 2015, the Italians built their own spectacular Monte Bianco cable car at Courmayeur, which stops at a 11,371 foot pinnacle on the border with France, with access to glacier trekking and its own 360- degree observation deck. (The video clip at the top of this post takes in half of the view.) Tony, his sister Pina, Annarita and I enjoyed cappuccinos at the bar at the top, with floor-to-ceiling views of the mountain and its Alpine brethren, set off by shifting clouds and a brilliant blue sky.
In August, our son Carl and his Brooklyn family sat in the same spot, part of a trip through Italy and France after a stay in Ethiopia where his partner Kidist’s family lives.
“I couldn’t pass it up,” he told me.
The “White Mountain”
There are over one million mountains in the world. Some of these feel enormous until you compare them to other super-sized peaks. Fourteen mountains in the world stand over 26,247 feet. Every one of them is found in south and central Asia, notably in the Himalayas.
While little more than half the height of these super-sized peaks, Mont Blanc or Monte Bianco, both meaning “white mountain,” is the highest peak in the Alps and Western Europe, rising 15,774 ft above sea level.
In 1760, the Swiss meteorologist and mountaineer Horace-Benedict de Saussure offered a financial prize to the first person(s) who successfully summited Mont Blanc. In 1786, two Chamonix gentlemen snagged the cash. In 1808, the first female climber reached the top. The Chamonix region, crowned by Mont Blanc, soon attracted a cast of notable visitors: Goethe, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur, Franz Liszt, two successive wives of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III.
In 1950, disaster struck when Air India Flight 245 crashed into Mont Blanc. In 1966, another Air India Flight collided with the summit, killing all 117 people on board. In 1960, by contrast, the pioneer of mountain flying Henri Giraud landed on the summit, which is only 98 feet long.
There is more.
In August 2003, seven French paraglider pilots landed on the summit. In June 2007, Danish artist Marco Evaristti draped the peak of Mont Blanc with red fabric, along with a 20-foot pole with a flag reading “Pink State”; he said he wanted to raise awareness of environmental degradation. In September 2007, a group of 20 people set up a hot tub at the summit and, five years later, 50 paraglider pilots landed there.
Although there is a small stretch along one of the two most popular routes to the top of Mont Blanc nicknamed “Death Gully,” because of the frequency of rockfalls, the reported annual number of hiking fatalities on Mont Blanc is between 10 and 20. On the busiest weekends, normally around August, the local rescue service records an average of 12 missions, mostly directed to aid people in trouble on one of the normal routes of the mountain.
Eternity and climate change
What struck me most this September as I inhaled Mont Blanc, the mountains by her side and the glaciers at her feet, was the majesty, the wind, and the silence, at once untameable and solid. Literally, and not just figuratively, I felt on top of the world, far removed from the daily crush of world news, anti-democracy trends, man-made catastrophes, the twin scourges of narcissism and invisibility, and so much more.
And while the phrase “frozen in time” can often be a lament, I wished that the majesty before me were sealed for eternity.
A recent study by the World Economic Forum reports that climate change is turning the Alps from white to green.
For years, local ground-based measurements have shown a decrease in snow depth at low elevations, causing some areas to become largely snow-free. High-resolution satellite images add to the story. They show that areas with vegetation above the tree line in the Alps have increased by 77 percent since 1984. Greener mountains reflect less sunlight and therefore lead to further warming, warn scientists, leading to further shrinkage of reflective snow cover.
It isn’t just snow cover that is being lost.
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