For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities have gazed upon the seemingly eternal glaciers and snow that gave Western Europe's highest peak its name: Mont Blanc, the white mountain.
But climate warming is dismantling the picture at alarming speed.
Europe's record heatwaves this summer savaged permafrost that for millennia has acted like glue on the Alpine landscape. Defrosting cliffs came apart, sending rock falls cascading from the heights. A famously dangerous gully that climbers have long braved on ascents to the summit, 4,805 metres up, became temporarily impassable.
“We weep for our mountain, the way it's changing. It hits us in the gut,” says Stéphane Bozon, a deputy mayor in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, a French town at the foot of the giant that straddles France's border with Italy.
“From mid-July onward, we saw an increase in rock falls. We saw areas becoming difficult to access because of glacial retreat and snowmelt on the glaciers, with crevasses opening up and rock collapses making some areas difficult to reach or traverse,” he says.
