Chamonix Redeux

In the summer of 1994 two friends and I packed our tents and got on a bus in London Victoria bound for Chamonix, my first taste of adventure travel without the family. I don’t think we had much of a plan but that week we camped in town, slept high up on the high ridges, walked the paths above the town, enjoyed the open air pool and I saw my first Alpine peaks, first glacier and we enjoyed the towns hospitality. If I remember rightly we saw Speed the movie on a rainy day, dubbed in French which I don’t think detracted much from the experience.

Thirty one years later the family and I popped in for the day while we were staying nearby in Morzine. As we did all those years ago we took the rack and pinion train up to 1913m and the Montenvers/Mer de Glace. I need to dig out the physical photographs but I don’t recall the visitors centre or the cable car in the 90s, I do remember walking back down to town in time for a cold beer and some campsite food though.

This time we did take the cable car down to the Mer de Glace to give the boys their first taste of a glacier in the ice cave. Sadly climate change means that the glacier is much shorter and shallower than it was and its rate of melting is only speeding up. I’ve studied environmental issues and tried to take jobs that help the environment but to see this reference point again was a shock to the system. Humans have got to sort it out, we are so naive in the lives we live.

I will have to return to Chamonix one day, not for the town, its nice but much busier than I remember but because I still haven’t taken the cable car to the Aiguille du Midi, still haven’t driven through the Mont Blanc tunnel to Italy and still haven’t stood on a true summit in the region.

If you haven’t been yet get to the Alps, in winter or summer, before it changes forever.