Camping les 2 Glaciers, 80 route des Tissières, Les Bossons, 74400 Chamonix Mont-Blanc.
I'm very pleased with this one, but the next is one of my most favourite ever!
The site had its own snowplough and snow blower. We were directed between patches of (im)permafrost onto a clear section of gravel roadway.
Not good shots at all but, I think you'll
agree, fairly full of atmosphere.
Towels drying in the roofspace on an impromptu clothesline made from a
stretch-hook.
Across the site floated piny wood smoke, but someone had neglected the stove's air mixing controls and it smelled too rich, too polluting.
Not quite not-smiling.
The stars shone clearly, but we had to turn off the Eberspacher heater. Outside the van it was an unhealthy +3ºC.
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Wasn't one of John Peel's early radio shows called, You're not going out dressed like that? |
At 7.30am it was -2ºC, but otherwise dull weather, which is partly why we didn't get mobile until 11am. |
| We drove past the Mer de Glace campsite, a favourite, just to make sure that it really was closed. | ||
| With a good 6-10" of undisturbed snow across the site it surely was. | ||
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Far left, La Flégère and Le Brévent and "Thass your holiday cottage, tha' is". Left, Geography in action. I was close to fascinated by the muddy stone chute cum temporary glacier. |
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Main street, Argentière. |
We'd come back to Argentière because in September 2003, when we'd driven through on our honeymoon, I'd noticed paths leading up through the woods. Full of enthusiasm I'd bought a good walking map (not as good as our Ordnance Survey's - how could it be?), but on several subsequent visits to the area we'd consistently failed to get back to Argentière. |
I am thrilled by this photograph. It's L'Aiguille Vert and we'd just driven onto the free car park at Argentière's railway station and that chirruping thrush (blackbird, fieldfare?), was determined to catch my attention.
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Shortly afterwards the oddest thing, or so it seemed to me, I saw swallows flying around over the station building! A little wander around the www has made me inclined to think that in March this was quite possible, but to me swallows and snow will never seem to go together.
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It wasn't really all that long before Jo learnt to walk.
I no longer own "the right sort of clothing" and I'm only a
little ashamed to say that I delight in wearing the "wrong" stuff.
Cynics amongst you (and I do hope there are some, because, hell, where would we be without you people?), might want to suggest that Jo's image has been superimposed onto this background, but it has not. She really is high up on a steep, snowy mountain side.
Christmas card?
Perhaps it had been several weeks earlier, but since whenever the previous snowfall might have been, no more than four people and several deer had used the path we'd chosen. We could see that to the best of their ability the deer had spread their hooves to increase their grip, but thawing had also made the prints look larger. Jo said the red deer's prints looked as big as Pan's.
We'd walked for about one hour when we came to a bench. On the bench slouched a skilfully built snowperson oddly possessed of a modest head of lichen-hair and, more oddly, a similar amount of pubic lichen-hair. I looked at the lichen on a tree nearby and realised that its grey-greenness seemed to match exactly the colour of our van's upholstery.
On a mountain walk a bench is not necessarily what one wants to see. Simply by being there it insinuates in a most convincing way that you, the walker, are no more than a walker, that you are most definitely not leading the first ascent (without oxygen) of the north face of Rum Doodle, or anywhere else particularly adventurous.
This image ©The Snowdude.
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This shot and the one above were messed up by what I fear might be permamuck inside the camera.
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We turned around on the edge of a not very long ago avalanched area where no large trees grew and many small ones were permanently leaning. Someone joining our path had been wearing snowshoes. |
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I thought this one looked quite Himalayan and allowed myself to be reminded of Doug Scott, Dougal Haston, Pete Boardman, Nick Estcourt and other big names of the '70s (Bonington, Joe Brown, Don Whillans, etc), some of whom I'd heard talk at Bristol's Coulston Hall on a post-expedition lecture (and what photographs!) tour. |
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L'Aiguille
du Midi
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Do you know what I mean by the downhill swagger? As we walked down I was conscious that at any minute the swagger might affect me and I pointed out to Jo that if perhaps we'd each had a bigger rucsac, then what an enormous, but useless, advantage we'd have had over anyone who might be walking past us on their way up our path. Our advantage would be that, for all the other walkers knew, we'd been out since sunrise or earlier enjoying the most heroic adventures over the most enormous distances. I didn't bother to add that most people are far too grown up and sensible (and lacking in imagination?), to think in such a way. And anyway we didn't meet any other walkers.
The villages of Montroc-le-Planet and Le Tour had caught my eye so we drove up to..............
