Night hike to the summit of Parmelan: when balance becomes an exercise in style
Report: The beauty of the peaks belongs to those who get up early... or who don't go to bed. What if we walked under the stars? A sensory and astronomical experience on the heights of Parmelan.
By Marie Vaton
Bivouac on the Parmelan. With astrophotographer Philippe Jacquot, at an altitude of over 1,800 meters. PHILIPPE JACQUOT
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Night, this terra incognita . Asleep, we don't see it "pass." It escapes us. Locked away, it is only compressed time, an indefinite moment that lives its life at night, outside of us: as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, it is "a time of deadly monotony under a roof; in the open air, on the other hand, it flows by, light among the stars and the dew and the perfumes." We still have to "see" it. Night does not fall upon the day like a black curtain. It darkens slowly. Who knows, for example, that every evening, a few minutes after sunset, if the sky is clear, we can see the shadow of our planet for a few moments? It is a slate-blue line topped with a pink band: the "belt of Venus." This pinkish glow is created by the light of the sun, still below the horizon.
If you enjoy sleeping upright and gazing at the stars, you must climb to the Camille-Dunant refuge. Perched atop Parmelan, one of the legendary peaks of the Bornes massif (Haute-Savoie), at an altitude of over 1,800 meters, it offers a picture-postcard alpine panorama of the Glières plateau, the Fillière valley, the Aravis mountains, and the Mont-Blanc range. Below, the three lakes: Lake Geneva, Annecy, and…
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