Updated Jan. 4, 2024 at 3:50 p.m.
SAINT-GERVAIS — Summer 2003, 20 years ago. A heatwave wreaks havoc, far beyond limits that were previously thought unbreakable.
When Jean-Marc Peillex decided to visit the dome of the Goûter, near the summit of Mont Blanc, to assess the damage, he had no idea what awaited him. As soon as he stepped outside of the French Civil Security Alouette helicopter that lifted him to 4,300 meters above sea level, it was a shock. Brutal; unspeakable.
Before his eyes, a partly melted snow cover lay yellowed by urine and littered with human feces. Like a giant freezer that had been unplugged, the massif had revealed a sinister truth that was previously frozen in its ice. Beneath the pristine postcard sold to tourists lay a much more disturbing reality.
Thus begins a 20-year battle for the mayor of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains. Years of noise and fury, decrees and fines, provocative statements and angry press releases, all aimed toward one goal: regulating access to Mont Blanc to restore the purity of Europe’s tallest mountain.
Also, to restore its values, those inherited from mountaineering. Not the values of others who, according to Peillex, would turn its majestic slopes into vulgar consumer products. “His” mountain — Peillex’s municipality partly owns it — is globally renowned. It is worth fighting for.
It is a crusade that will earn the mayor numerous nicknames: “The madman,” “The self-proclaimed mayor of Mont Blanc,” “Don Quixote.” In 20 years, Jean-Marc Peillex has heard them all. And everyone knows that in the mountains, sounds easily amplify, it’s in the depths of the valley that the most bitter detractors are to be found.
Saint-Gervais against Chamonix
Just 18 kilometers from Saint-Gervais lies the prosperous Chamonix, nestled among the conifers that descend the majestic slopes to the edges of its streets. Elegant shops, quality hotels, chalets blending into the surroundings, and a grandiose backdrop.
Nothing in its pedestrianized and strangely calm city center in late October gives any indication of the over-tourism that, with the complicit guilt of local leaders, argues Peillex, threatens the town.
And this is precisely what annoys Eric Fournier, the mayor of the town. “I challenge you,” he says. “You choose any place in the valley. I’ll take you there, and in less than an hour, I’ll lead you on foot to a place where you won’t see more than 10 people in a day.”
For 20 years, the elected official has lived under the public attacks of the mayor of Saint-Gervais. In 20 years, he has responded with a rigor from which this son of a crystal worker, born in Chamonix, and himself an alpinist at times, never departs.
While he claims to maintain a cordial relationship with his colleague, Fournier does not hide a real annoyance at what he considers an unjust quarrel, exaggerated by media always eager for sensationalism.
A longstanding quarrel
The quarrel? It boils down to one formula, at the start of an anthology of well-spoken sentences that have partly made Saint-Gervais’ mayor’s success: “The climbers of Mont-Blanc drink their beer in Chamonix and come piss it here.”
For the uninitiated, who have yet to set foot in the valley and its villages, here’s the explanation: the normal route to the summit of Mont-Blanc, the one taken by 75% of would-be climbers every year, passes through Saint-Gervais, where the cogwheel tramway leading to the Nid-d’Aigle station, at 2,372 meters, is located. But three-quarters of these climbers sleep, eat and drink in Chamonix.
At this point of the story, it is tempting to see this conflict as just another episode in a series that is particularly fashionable in the French political landscape: the unequal struggle between a rural community attached to local values — in this case, those of the mountains — and a globalized society, won over by commercialism and now selling off these same values.
Today, it’s the whole valley that needs to be managed.
If so, the Mont-Blanc valley would soon be consigned to the hell of over-tourism, where other prestigious destinations such as the Calanques of Marseille, Barcelona, or Venice will soon sink. And that’s to say nothing of Everest, where images of rope climbers in endless queues have been seen worldwide. This being France, caricature is never far away, at the risk of dominating a debate that deserves much better.
That’s what Antoine Rattin, former warden of the Goûter refuge and himself a mountain guide, is trying to make clear today. “The two mayors are right,” he says, without fear of upsetting anyone in a debate in which one would be obliged to choose sides. “Something had to be done to stem a trend towards over-visiting Mont Blanc in the mid-2000s. But climbing the normal route is only a small part of the problem. Today, it’s the whole valley that needs to be managed. And that’s what the mayor of Chamonix is trying to do.”
Over- and bad- visiting
When the mayor of Saint-Gervais disembarks his helicopter, it’s not just droppings he sees. He also saw a forest of tents – 90 of them, according to him – set up next to the old refuge, which has since been rebuilt and relocated.
However, the town planning code, which has governed the area since Mont-Blanc was classified as a site of scenic interest in 1951, expressly forbids bivouacs. The problem was that the refuges were saturated. With 120 places at the time, the Goûter hut, the last station before the final assault on the summit, could not keep up with the crowds. Sometimes tempers flared and fights broke out. More than over-visiting, it was “mal-visiting” from which Mont Blanc was suffering.
With the advent of social media, where everyone wants to take a selfie at 4,805 meters, the environment and even safety often take a back seat.
The anecdotes of would-be climbers, who rival each other in carelessness, even incivility — not to mention sheer stupidity — are legion, from those who climb in sneakers to those Latvians who plant their national flag on the summit, to one who finds nothing better to do than carry his rowing machine to the roof of Europe.
Most, as souvenirs, don’t hesitate to leave their garbage behind, like the plastic strips that day campers place on the snow to insulate themselves from the cold. Tour operators who sell trips that make the Mont-Blanc look like a leisurely stroll bear a great responsibility for this phenomenon.
“Just this August, I saw a four-person rope party climbing to the Goûter refuge at an altitude of 3,835 meters,” says Antoine Rattin. “Four people is too many to walk on ice. For maximum safety, you have to be roped up two by two, with quite a bit of space in between. They had a 60-meter rope. I cut it in half.”
How to calm over-tourism
At its peak, almost 300 people a day set out to conquer what was considered an “achievable feat.” But on May 31, 2019, after endless polemics and despite the indignation of many mountain lovers who believe that the mountains must above all remain a place of freedom, Jean-Marc Peillex finally got what he had been calling for: a prefectural decree now imposes new rules for access to the site, such as compulsory, nominative reservations in the refuges.
Everyone will tell you that it’s much more pleasant to climb Mont Blanc in 2023 than in 2018.
Brigades made up of civil servants and gendarmes were deployed to check arrivals as soon as they got off the tramway. Those who don’t have their precious master key are politely, but firmly, turned away.
This control through accommodation is the ultimate weapon. Largely relayed on the same social networks that were driving traffic to the site, this dissuasive tool is proving particularly effective.
Today, an estimated 200 people attempt the climb every day in high season. The normal route has finally been pacified. “Everyone will tell you that it’s much more pleasant to climb Mont Blanc in 2023 than in 2018,” explains Antoine Rattin.
“I, someone who has been accused of not being a mountaineer, have defended mountaineering better than anyone else,” boasts Jean-Marc Peillex, always quick to denounce the Chamoniards, “those mountain industrialists who accuse me of wanting to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”
The existential challenge of global warming
Olivier Greber is not from Chamonix. Born in Alsace, he became president of the prestigious and all-powerful “Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix,” immortalized in the epic novels of Roger Frison-Roche. He is one of those who still haven’t digested the verbal excesses of the mayor of Saint-Gervais.
For this mountain guide, who boasts 70 ascents of Mont-Blanc in his career, it’s not the prefectural decrees that have regulated climbing to the summit. But a much more perennial phenomenon: global warming.
Sketch in hand, he explains: “The trickiest part is the Goûter corridor, because of the rock falls. You have to get through at night, when the ice is still cold. But the window of passage has narrowed with the warming. As a result, it’s no longer enough to spend one night in a refuge to reach the summit. You need two nights. One on the way up, the other on the way back, to get through the corridor in good conditions,” he says.
‘À la fraîche,’ so to speak. The constraint has, by necessity, regulated access to Mont-Blanc, as is the case for the whole of the high mountain. As the permafrost melts, it no longer holds the granite slabs in place, threatening to collapse. Since 1850, warming in Chamonix has been measured at +3.6°F, twice as fast as in the entire northern hemisphere.
It’s a major, existential challenge that informs all of the choices Eric Fournier is already forced to make to build a sustainable tourism policy for the next thirty years. A single example, which sheds light on everything: given its geographical location, Chamonix will be one of the few ski resorts still able to offer abundant snow in the future.
What will happen when skiers flock to Chamonix’s welcoming slopes? And, above all, what should we do? Increase the infrastructure to accommodate them? Or, on the contrary, contain them?
Efforts to slow uncontrolled growth
It’s the latter option that the mayor of Chamonix has chosen. “There will be fewer ski lifts at the end of my mandate than there were at the beginning,” he assures us. For him, it’s the symbol of a consistent policy, which very quickly led him to opt for reasoned tourism. In 15 years, no new accommodation capacity has been authorized in the city. Numerous hotel projects have been turned down.
Even Club Med ended up leaving the town because the mayor refused to allow it to expand, which would have meant giving up 25,000 square meters of land. “I don’t want to increase tourist numbers. I want to qualify it,” explains the mayor.
One of the challenges: stabilizing a population which may flee, discouraged by property prices of between 10,000 and 12,000 euros per square meter. Another challenge is to make the area as car- and truck-free as possible, with the Mont Blanc tunnel at the entrance to the town sucking in thousands of cars and trucks every day.
The mayor has managed to obtain a 50% increase in public transport services within the valley, starting in December. “At a time when energy prices will continue to rise, this is obviously the way of the future,” he says.
Aiming to contain the flow
There’s still the problem of day-trippers, who arrived in the valley in ever-increasing numbers after COVID-19, swollen by this new phenomenon known as “staycation,” and partly due to the return of inflation. “These ‘vacations at home’ are leading a growing number of families to practice local tourism,” explains Nicolas Durochat, head of the Chamonix Tourist Office.
To measure the extent of this trend, the tourist office has set up a counting system that uses telephone SIM cards to track the comings and goings of visitors daily (while, of course, preserving their anonymity). Today, the number of day-trippers in high season is estimated at 25,000, almost half of whom come from neighboring towns.
These are down-to-earth initiatives
The flow of visitors has increased over the past year, and this has put a strain — still under control, but for how long? — on infrastructure such as parking lots and mid-mountain trails.
Here, again, the town council is doing its utmost to contain the flow. A counting system is already in place on the most popular trails. There are even plans to create limited-traffic zones, banning cars from outside Chamonix from certain areas.
These are down-to-earth initiatives, far removed from the media hype surrounding Europe’s most famous mountain. But perhaps such a symbol was needed to keep the debate alive.
On Oct. 26, Fournier held a “Summit for a Sustainable Mountain” in Chamonix, alongside Olivia Grégoire, Minister Delegate for Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises, Trade, Crafts and Tourism. It was an opportunity to discuss with local and international players the many initiatives being taken to contain the risks of over-tourism, as well as to reach out to Peillex, who was invited to speak on the occasion. Haute-Savoie has a chivalrous spirit.
