Mountain landscape - Europe

Grand Pilier d'Angle and Mont Blanc

Hidden from sight when you’re in Chamonix is the massive eastern flanks of Mont Blanc, Mont Blanc du Tacul and Mont Maudit, which I’ve learnt from mountaineering literature is home to some of the most challenging and majestic climbing routes in the Alps. On the Italian side, beneath Monte Bianco (Mont Blanc), there’s the imposing and challenging Brenva face - 1,400m of steep rock, snow and ice described by Katie Ives in the American Alpine Journal as a “chaos of cliffs, towers, and buttresses, fringed by unstable seracs and swept by avalanches and rockfall” which is home to hard climbs put up by elite climbers such as Francois Marsigny and Patrick Garabbou, John Bouchard and Walter Bonatti. The terrain includes Grand Pilier d’Angle, just left of centre, a great rock buttress that tops out onto Peuterey Arête, said to be one of the longest climbing routes in the Alps.

The summit of Pilier d’Angle is somewhat hidden from sight in this photograph, the obvious horizon on the left being part of the equally imposing south face of Mont Blanc (home to other classic alpine routes such as Central Pillar of Freney and the Brouillard ridge - In fact, I think you can see the Central Pillar of Freney in the background, in the sunlight and shade). The obvious saddle on the left of the photograph beneath Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey is Col de Peuterey and if you follow the ridge up the light-coloured rock to the next snowy saddle I expect you’d be on top but with 500 metres of climbing still to go to reach the summit of Mont Blanc de Courmayeur (and another 60m to the summit of Mont Blanc, which is the top of western Europe).

Such daring exploits aside, there’s then me, at completely the other end of the scale, capturing this image simply by pointing my camera from a viewing point at Pointe Helbronner. My wife and I were on a trekking trip to Chamonix and we had decided that for a rest day we would visit Aiguille du Midi station above Chamonix and take the telepherique across to Punta (or Pointe) Helbronner in Italy. I’ve never had any appetite to do this before but I’m very glad we did because the views it provides are insane (as is the concept of the gondola across the glacier, which clatters through the Gross Rognon). Out one window, as you dangle 140m above the glacier, is the full east side of Mont Blanc, giving off a sense of what I can only imagine is Himalayan scale grandeur and out the other is the great tooth of Dent du Géant above Glacier du Géant, plus the Valle Blanche glacier as it heads downhill towards Les Drus and Aiguille Verte on its way to its exit onto the Mer de Glacé.