CLIMATE CHANGE INTHE BIRTHPLACEOF ALPINISM

Once upon a time the Chamonix Valley at the foot of the Mont Blanc massif was a place of farmers. When they were not working the land, the farmers moonlighted as guides, taking wealthy tourists from all around Europe up the nearby mountains. First summited in 1786, Mont Blanc, western Europe’s tallest mountain, quickly established itself as a must-see for nineteenth-century travellers. The funicular railway up to the Mer De Glace glacier above the town began running in 1908 and Chamonix hosted the first-ever winter Olympics in 1924.

“Chamonix is really the place where alpinism and ski alpinism started,” says Sébastien Rougegré, director of adventure company Chamonix Experience. “Just look up and you have the mountains. It's so easy. You just walk a couple of hours and you're at the bottom of the face. For the last 200 years, people here have been enjoying something that’s pretty hard to get to in other places in the world.”

That enjoyment is now under threat. Rougegré has been running his guiding company for 13 years, but volatile weather means his job is only getting harder. “I have to change plans all the time,” he explains. “If I have a plan for the summer, it's being changed because of the global warming. Last winter we had no snow for three months. It was super dry. Or we get a meter of snow and the following day we have like rain for two days.”

Climate-change impact is at its most visible in the glaciers. As a young man, Rougegré, who is now 42, did his mountain-guide training at the foot of the Bossons glacier, which used to come all the way down to the town of Chamonix. Over the intervening years, the Bossons has receded four or five hundred meters up the mountain.

The unprecedented speed of change means that guiding companies like his are constantly having to open up new routes with new ladders and bridges to safely get their customers to the mountain huts that dot the Mont Blanc massif. “We have to mitigate the risk by stopping people going to certain places or changing the itineraries,” Rougegré explains. “Our playground is just disappearing. It's falling apart.”

Rougegré is aware of the paradox at the heart of his work. Guiding clients around Chamonix who have flown halfway around the world to get there contributes to the very carbon emissions that drive the warming that is harming the mountains. “If you want my opinion, we're a huge part of the problem. Asking ourselves what we should do is the next challenge for all mountain guides,” he says.

Rougegré sees a two-part solution. First, guides should act as messengers, sharing their intimate knowledge of the impacts of global warming with their global clients and inspiring them to think of nature as something that you enjoy and protect. Second, guides should concentrate more on working locally. Says Rougegré: “I believe we're living the last years of traveling with clients. Very soon, we're just going to remain local. We will be guiding locally much more than in the past, when everybody was going everywhere.”

Keeping things simple and local may ultimately lead to richer and more satisfying experiences than the fly-in, fly-out approach. “What you need to do is connect with your people on the mountain, connect with your guide, speak with the guardian who's been looking after the hut. Try to have something that is much deeper than what society and social media brings at the moment,” Rougegré says.
Despite all the challenges Chamonix is facing, Rougegré remains relatively upbeat. “I see global warming as an end, but I trust we can still make the changes necessary. I truly hope humanity opens its eyes and acts accordingly to protect nature,” he says.