According to a French mayor, climbing the Mont Blanc now requires a €15,000 (£12,640; $15,370) deposit to cover rescue and potential funeral expenses.
Mayor of Saint-Gervais, a town at the base of Western Europe’s tallest mountain, with a summit elevation of 4,807 meters, is Jean-Marc Peillex (15,774ft).
He claimed that those who disregarded warnings and climbed the mountain through the Goûter route were “playing Russian roulette.”
Rockfalls have risen due to the hot wave.
According to Mayor Peillex, the average cost of a mountain rescue is €10,000, while the average cost of a burial is €5,000. In a press release, he stated that it was unacceptable for the French taxpayer to bear those expenses.
According to his statement on the village’s official website, mountaineers coming from Saint-Gervais or the adjacent Alpine resort of Chamonix were no longer being taken by mountain guides up the well-known Goûter route, also known as the Royal Way. Their ruling is valid until no later than the middle of August.
Some “pseudo climbers,” according to Mayor Peillex, insisted on going up the mountain “with death in their knapsack.”
“I wanted to make people react, to understand that nowadays going up is incredibly risky, nearly suicidal,” he said in a statement to the media.
Rockfalls have forced him to close the mountain refuges at Goûter and Tête Rousse until further notice. He claimed that on Thursday there had been a significant rockfall that, had anyone been in its path, would have killed them.
He told the reporters that while he has the authority to enforce the suggested deposit, he has not yet made a legal decision on it. The sum “needs to be stunning to focus attention on this,” he claimed. Anyone who believes it to be unlawful may dispute it in court, he continued.
He claimed that on July 30, a group of Romanians were discovered on the peak dressed in shorts and sneakers. He claimed that a police helicopter gave them the go-ahead to turn around and that as they did so, they promised to return the next day.
The absence of winter snow and this summer’s extreme heat have made rocks unstable and made traversing crevasses more challenging. As glaciers melt in the Alps due to the heat from climate change, avalanche risk has increased.
Only a dozen to twenty experienced mountaineers, as opposed to the typical 100 to 120, were able to reach the summit each day, according to a professional guide in Chamonix.
With 11 peaks in France and Italy that are higher than 4,000 meters, Mont Blanc typically draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. In addition to Goûter, a number of other routes up the mountain are still open in spite of the dangers, including one from Courmayeur in Italy.
According to Mayor Peillex, he lacks the legal authority to shut down the Goûter route.
He claimed that this year has seen a decrease in the number of rescues and fatalities in the Mont Blanc massif. Most years, the massif sees hundreds of rescues and several dozen climber fatalities.
