My sweet friend left me a message today that said, among many things, that Chamonix seems like “a place that is very well-suited for a stasia” — which she figured is because of the public transit, great markets, amazing runs, and sweet people.
And, yes! I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms exactly, but I think she’s right. I love this place so, so much because it really does play to the things that make me happy: an easy car-free lifestyle, great transit access to so many amazing mountain adventures, lovely outdoor markets I can walk to with good produce, and such a sweet French family who has folded me into their life.
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(the mountain bike that my “family” lent me for the month:) They also, once James showed up this weekend, lent him a bike too, which is just the sweetest thing ever <3 Notice the train tracks! I take that train up and down the valley so much these days:)
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I cannot overemphasize how much I love the train in this valley. (And I haven’t even branched out into taking the bus yet, which I’m sure would only expand the options that I still don’t feel like I’ve even remotely exhausted with only the train yet.)
The other day, I took a 30-minute train ride up the valley, for example, to Le Buet, and right from the train station started running on a trail. And I ran for over 20 miles through the mountains, back toward and then way past my little apartment. Finally, I emerged way down the valley at the Servoz train station, and hopped back on a train to get back to the stop in Chamonix that is about a 4-minute walk from my apartment. That is so fricken elegant.
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(Mont Blanc from that run:)
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(Lac D’Anterne from that run too. It was a random 4ish-mile detour to get to this lake, but I’d been kinda meaning to go there and I felt like I was much closer on this run than I ever would be again starting from the valley floor, so why not?:)
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(And Lac de Pormenaz also from that run:) It was a pretty fricken outrageous run;)
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Or today, for another example, James and I had a lazy morning and then caught the same train (but later:) up the valley, this time with our bikes. When we got to the last stop before Switzerland, we hopped off, biked a few kilometers into Switzerland, parked our bikes and went for a little hike in this super cool gorge with cascading waterfalls. And then since why not, we biked all the way home rather than taking the train again, because it is a beautiful bike ride and there are lovely waterfront paths and even after the hike we still had time before James had to start work.
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(Commute one way: train! (though this picture is from the Servoz station on a different day)
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(Commute the other way: bike home! <3)
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I feel like it is going to be a bit of a letdown when I get home and it takes a bunch of driving to get to this kind of trail run or hike again. Ha! I mean, something I love so very much about Portland is how bikeable and car-free-able it really is, especially for an American city, and I love the access to nature via Forest Park, or, further afield, the Columbia River Gorge or tons of other lovely spots that I know I will be happy to rediscover when I’m back. I guess Forest Park is maybe our version of being able to walk to a train (the MAX, that is), get off immediately onto a trail, and run for 30 one-way miles before you take a bus home. And I love that very much. But yowza, when it’s Mont Blanc in the background and amazing alpine meadows and lakes and just so, so many different adventure options all around, it just hits a little differently;)
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(I loved this lone tree very much:) From near Passage du Dérochoir)
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I’ve been thinking a lot about whether this is a vacation kind of thing, or whether if I actually lived here and had a job and real obligations it would still feel so easily car-free-able. And I guess I look to my little “family” here as an example. They do have one car, but they’ve ceaselessly offered to lend it to me (ha, I want nothing to do with it) because they don’t use it during the week anyway: Jeanne bikes about 7 minutes to the train and then takes the same valley train to work, Cyril bikes to work, and both their kiddos who still live at home take the train to school. They can walk to the grocery store. For the hike Jeanne and Cyril and I all took together, we drove to the start, but with two bikes on the back of the car because Cyril had to go pick up their daughter and a few of her friends from some far-flung climbing area with a little bit of a time crunch, so he took the car immediately from the trailhead while Jeanne and I biked home. Their lifestyle feels so very familiar to me, since they have seamlessly integrated biking and transit into all the things they routinely do, using the car only for special occasions.
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(Gratuitous glacier picture! heh. This is La Jonction, where Glacier des Bossons and Glacier de Taconnaz meet below Mont Blanc, and to get here I was able to bike about 15 minutes to the trailhead and then just start hiking:)
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There’s so much else too, like how the landscape is absolutely littered with well-marked walking paths, not just in the mountains but through the city and all the little villages. Like there will be a road that goes up a hillside, but because walking up the road is dumb, there will be separate walking paths that weave in and out between people’s houses and fields, always well-signed and frequently with a time estimate for how long it will take you to get to whatever destination, that you can just follow to wherever you want to go.
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(This, for example, was a sign from when I walked to the Wednesday evening farmer’s market between Taconnaz and Les Houches. I took the train to Taconnaz to make the initial walk shorter, but then followed signs for the “chemin des villages” to the next train station down in Les Houches cuz I wanted more of a walk and it is such a delight to just follow signs like this through town:)
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(Or this sign from higher up in the mountains, to illustrate the timing;)
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So it feels kind of like there’s one network of transportation corridors that you might drive on, and then there’s a whole other network that you can use to walk or bike to all the same places and then some, but on sweet little paths. I love everything about it so much:)
Moral of the story, I guess, if there is such a thing, is that my friend is right: this is a place that is very friendly to the sorts of things I want in my life, and it is such a delight to be somewhere where I can very much do everything I want to do with my feet and a bicycle and public transit. And I’m grateful that when I come home, minus the easy high-mountain access, I will still be able very much to do everything I want with my feet and a bicycle and public transit. It’s a sweet life I have <3