|
 Dwight Peck's personal website
End of Summer 2002
A hike to the cabane of Plan-Névé
Summer
2002 swooped in fast, blasted by over our heads with an acrid smell, and disappeared
over the horizon. September is already upon us.
The
tiny twin glaciers of Plan Névé lie at about 2500m just to the east
of the mighty Grand Muveran, looking from the Rhône river valley like two
off-white little butterflies.
Fairly
unsettled weather, September 2002, as Mr Dan Hinckley
then of IUCN-The World Conservation Union, intrigued by his hiking companion's long-winded
descriptions of the glories of the Plan Névé, sets out from the
Pont de Nant to see this alleged wonder for himself.
| 
That's
the Grand Muveran, seen from the Rhône valley floor. The glaciers of Plan-Névé
extend down to the left.
The
red dot shows the Cabane de Plan Névé from halfway up the trail,
in July 2005. |
Mr
Hinckley, ascending from the trailhead at Pont de Nant, which lies at 1253m up
a narrow road from Plans-sur-Bex, which lies up a narrow road from -- guess! --
Bex, near Aigle in the Rhône valley, confronts foggy, craggy things
that draw him upwards.
Mr
Hinckley stalks past the farm of Le Richard and
prepares to address some serious uphill.
The
farm of Le Richard (1535m), just before the hiking begins to require measured breathing
The
front part of the Muveran looming nearby
The
trail upward. Upward. Upward. And then . . . upward.
The
first glaciers appear, over on the side of the Grand Muveran.
The
way forward, upward, no sign of an end in sight yet
First
doubts
Mr
Hinckley, en route for Plan Névé, takes a well-deserved break
for an orange, a banana, a mix of nuts and prunes, and a steak smothered in onions,
and then heads up towards the Cabane.
YEP!
No worries! There's the Cabane of Plan-Névé smiling down upon us,
on the last day of the season, as the guardian staff
sells off all the unused kitchen stocks and prepare to go back to the ground floor
for another season.
Somehow
sensing a good deal on the out-of-date groceries, Mr Dan jogs over to the hut
at Plan Névé (2262m) hoping to get in on the action.
The Cabane de Plan Névé in September 2002
Here,
from the cabane, is a view up to the Col des Chamois (2660m), looking fairly forbidding
from Mr Peck's point of view. Mr Peck has been up there his-own-self, but on cross-country
skis up the Glacier of Paneirosse on the far side -- he takes a dim view of this
side of the thing.
The
glacier near the cabane
The
two glaciers of Plan-Névé, looking like a butterfly from the valley
below, but actually with a sizable impediment between them.
Mr Hinckley
at rest
Mr
Peck anxious to get moving
Weather
declining, time to go home, September 2002
Exiting
the cabane's gulley bound earthward
With
a view back towards the farm Le Richard that makes old knees ache
Le
Richard on the return route.
One's
hiking route lies up from Pont de Nant (1253m), with its charming restaurant and
the world's first alpine botanical garden [really!], and the beautiful
little valley of Nant running southward (left, off the map) under the Muveran and
Dent de Morcles, where Marlowe Tyson Peck went hiking two days prior to her birth.
Vallon de Nant, a portentous occasion in November 1984
|
Marlowe
Tyson Peck
. . .
|
.
. . hiking in the Vallon de Nant on 11 November 1984, just three days before her
birth, with assistance from her mother (above). |
 Feedback
and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative,  All
rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 10 February 2014.
|
