In front of the entrance to the ice cave, a man shovels a few times before the flow of visitors arrives. At 34, Antoine Claret-Tournier works as a “grottu”: he is responsible, for the Compagnie du Mont-Blanc, for digging and maintaining a 165-meter labyrinth, excavated inside the glacier.
Every year, like Sisyphus pushing his rock, he digs a new cave using a small tunnel boring machine – a four-month job. In 2023, it melted too quickly and did not even last the season. Another one had to be built more quickly than expected. There is no question, for the moment, of giving it up: the cave is eagerly awaited by visitors to the Mer de Glace. That year, 450,000 people came to this major tourist site in Haute-Savoie. For 38 euros, they took an antique little red train (put into service in 1909) which leaves from Chamonix, then a gondola which leads to the foot of a glacier sandwiched between two mountain sides. The whole world meets there: on the day of our visit, April 2, 2024, we met French people from all regions, Americans, Argentines, Spaniards, Chinese…
“New steps added every year”
And visitors could be even more numerous in the years to come, because, since February, a new gondola has changed the accessibility of the site. Faster, with more capacity, this 23 million euro ski lift allows us to avoid the endless staircase of 600 steps that we took (in both directions!) to reach the foot of the glacier.
“For the elderly, the children, it had become very complicated. As the glacier melts, new steps have to be added every year. We made the choice to move the gondola, to have more years of operation ahead of us”, explains Stéphane Seux, the director of this site, Montenvers, operated by the Compagnie du Mont-Blanc.
From now on, access is very comfortable, with a very reduced number of steps. “And then, for the skiers of the Vallée Blanche, who end their journey there, it will be much more comfortable. We will be able to do more rotations”adds Pierre Schropff, of the Compagnie des guides du Mont-Blanc, who accompanied two Americans that day in this legendary “off-piste” of Chamonix.
There is, however, something paradoxical, even slightly morbid, in organizing the arrival of thousands of visitors to a site whose disappearance is announced. Because the Mer de Glace is one of the tourist places where climate change is most visible. The glacier is melting at a maddening speed: since 1991, it has lost more than 100 meters at the train arrival station.
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