Mountain landscape - Europe

Paragliding in front of Aiguilles du Dru and Aiguille Verte

Chamonix is well known as the mountain sports capital of the world. Parapenting, or paragliding, is hugely popular, with the skies filled with colourful sails as pilots soar above the peaks seeking out thermal winds, upward currents of warm air that help them to gain and retain height. Planpraz near Le Brévent, 2000m above sea level, is a popular take-off point for the views of Mont Blanc and Aiguille du Midi, both for solo pilots and for tandem flights with guides and clients. Grands Montets near Argentière I understand is another departure point further north for more experienced pilots, who take off on Pas de Chevre glacier for adventurous flights above Aiguille Chardonnet and Aiguille du Tour plus, as shown in this photograph, the spectacular Aiguille Verte and Les Drus. 

I’ve not been paragliding (I kindly have an invite from an Edinburgh-born guide who works in Chamonix) and for this shot my wife and I were trekking on Grand Balcon Sud across the valley, which has a great view of the Drus. A telephoto 70-200mm lens helped me to compress this view of the pilot against the mountains. Petit Dru especially, in the centre, is a mountain full of mountaineering lore, from Gary Hemming’s rescue of two German climbers in 1966, Walter Bonatti’s 6-day solo climb of the SE ‘Bonatti’ Pillar in 1955 (the scar of which you can see after it fully collapsed) and Joe Simpson, who, along with Ian Whittaker, attempted to climb the same route in 1987 but ended up spending many hours dangling from a single piton after the ledge they were bivvying on collapsed off the wall. More recently, Will Sim and the late Corrado ‘Korra’ Pesce put up a new route on the rock scar in 2021, as did Thomas Auvaro, Léo Billon, Jordi Noguere and Sébastien Ratel from the Chamonix High Mountain Military Group, and Alex Honnold soloed most of the American Direct route the same year for Jon Griffiths ‘Soloist VR’ film (the route was first soloed in 1982 by Christophe Profit). Remarkably, Honnold also solo down-climbed the route for good measure. (Sadly, Pesce, who supported the team filming the ascent, died the next again year in an avalanche on Cerro Torre).

Popular today by Will Sim and others is an activity which I believe was first coined by British adventurer Leo Houlding, which he termed Para-alpinism, where mountaineers climb technical peaks (both in the Alps and the Himalayas) and then paraglide off instead of climbing back down.