This was my third trip to Chamonix, and by now I know the valley well enough to want to walk it differently each time. So instead of heading up toward Mont Blanc, we did the opposite — starting in the Plan Praz ski area and hiking backwards along the ridge to La Flégère, out of the lift-serviced ground and into the wilder, more rugged alpine paths as we headed up the Chamonix valley.
It was a dry week. Drier than I remembered from previous trips, and the trails showed it — dust instead of the usual damp grit underfoot. There was talk lower down in town about high-altitude alpinism routes being closed, the kind of thing that's becoming more familiar every summer as the heat reaches higher into the range. Up on the ridge itself though, it didn't feel harsh. There's a breeze that comes with hiking high in the Alps that cuts straight through any heat from the valley floor, and for most of the walk that was the overriding sensation — dry ground underfoot, cool air moving past, and the summit doing its own thing entirely.
That's really what stopped me. Clouds were rolling off the top of Mont Blanc the whole afternoon, spilling down from the summit in a way that made the mountain look like it was actively venting rather than just sitting there. From the Grand Balcon Sud side of the valley, the depth of the view opens right up — you get the full run from the valley floor across to the opposite wall, glaciers, ridgelines, all of it in one sweep.
I was hiking with just the Fujifilm GFX100RF as my only camera for the week — a medium format body doing double duty as a walking companion, which is not the obvious choice for multi-day trekking, but the panoramic range it can capture made scenes like this one worth every gram of it in the bag. This is the shot that came out of that afternoon: the cloud pouring off the summit, the valley falling away beneath it, and a sense of scale that's hard to get without that width in the frame.
Chamonix keeps changing a little more each time I go back. This felt like a trip that was as much about noticing that as it was about the walking itself.
SHOP THIS PRINT Mont Blanc Massif
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