High Mountain Walking

'Why don't we take the cable car to 2300 metres and do a walk from there. There won't be much snow.' - those words were uttered without a care in the world.

The next thing we knew, we were trekking for four hours across deep snowbanks upto our waists, on the edge of near vertical drops. We were trying to follow the 'Grand Balcon' trail, but hardly a trace of it remained visible under the snow, and a two hour walk turned into a four hour marathon across the high mountains of Chamonix.

It is not my place to lay blame for our trek across dangerous snowy mountain terrain, but I will let the evidence speak for itself.

This man may or may not have been responsible for us trekking through the snow for four hours. His identity has been concealed to prevent repercussions.

The scenery was nice, with good views across the valley, and at the beginning the going was not too bad.

High mountain scenery

After a couple of hours we stopped for lunch, and we discovered to our horror that an unknown person had forgotten to buy bread in the shop. Again, I will not place blame, but leave you to regard the evidence...

We ploughed on after a banana for lunch, and arrived exhausted at the Mer de Glace where there was thankfully a train back down the mountain.

Walking in the mountains

At the end we had very wet feet.

The high mountain having been sucessfully conquered, we enjoyed our train ride back down to the valley, where we went to buy snowdomes and other high quality tourist merchandise.

Posted by paul at May 28, 2005 11:59 AM