12
February
Anouk Ferrier — Guide
Base — 228 cm
Summit — −12 °C
12
February
Base — 228 cm
Summit — −12 °C
Left the Aiguille du Midi at nine with Jean-Luc, who has guided the Vallée Blanche something over four hundred times and still checks the arréte with a rope on a day like this one.
The arréte is the part people photograph and the part that concentrates the mind: a metre-wide ridge of snow with two thousand metres of air on the left and rather more on the right, descended in ski boots with the skis on your shoulder. It takes about eight minutes. Nobody speaks.
After that the glacier opens out and it becomes, for two hours, the most generous piece of skiing in Europe. Twenty-two kilometres, twenty-eight hundred metres of descent, and a landscape that has no relationship to a ski resort at all — seracs the size of buildings, crevasse fields that Jean-Luc reads the way other people read a street map, and a silence broken only by the ice moving somewhere underneath.
The glacier is not what it was. Jean-Luc points out where the ice reached in the photographs in his father’s hut and where it reaches now, and the difference is not subtle and does not require any particular expertise to see. The lower section, which was skiable to the valley within living memory, now ends in a staircase of four hundred and eighty steps.
We climbed them at half past two, slowly, and drank something hot at the top while the Montenvers train came up through the trees.
Elsewhere in the log
Twelve entries so far. The season decides how many more.
Everything the house wrote down this winter, in the order it happened. Turn the spiral to look through them, or take the next entry below.
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