Chemmy Alcott Should Learn What Glaciers Are Really Like!

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness/Paul Kolk

 

My eldest son Locki, who is seven, wants to be a ski racer like me and his dad, but I’m really torn.

I don’t know if this sport, which has brought me so much opportunity and love, will be around for Locki and his little brother Cooper to enjoy.

It is 100 years since Chamonix hosted the first Winter Olympics in 1924, but research by the International Olympic Committee last year found only 10 countries will be able to host snow sports by 2040 due to the impact of climate change.

Chamonix’s legacy is rightly being celebrated – but actually, I think there’s a sadness in celebrating something that is changing so radically.

We’re in Chamonix at the moment and wanted to bring you the men’s downhill World Cup action from here in this week’s episode of Ski Sunday. But it has been cancelled, along with the women’s downhill in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, due to high temperatures and therefore poor snow conditions.

Cancellations are becoming the norm. I feel like we’re not giving the mountains, which give us this opportunity to show how great our sport is, the love and the protection they need.

You always remember your first win in sports. Well, I remember the first time I skied Vallee Blanche.

And then I went back there 25 years later thinking I knew what to expect. But I was just blown away by how much it had changed.

When I was 10, I took five steps from the run to walk to the gondola. When I went back 25 years later, those five steps had become 580.

The glacier has lost so much volume at the bottom, more than 100m – that’s more than the height of Big Ben. Think of that vertical height, lost in just my lifetime.

Now, when you hike up the steps, there is a plaque every 10m showing the retreat of the glacier, and you can see how quickly it is happening.

It’s something that you can’t ignore once you’ve seen it. I have become passionate about it, but I’ll admit it’s something that took me a long time to become passionate about.

When I was a ski racer for Great Britain, I didn’t really look up at what was around me. From 1999 to 2014, I spent my life in a very selfish, vicious circle of travelling the world racing, training and then travelling again. It was about me being as fast as I could be.

It took this second time at Vallee Blanche for me to realise how the mountains are changing right in front of my eyes – and for me to really start caring.

That danger of the very immediate future is causing me to try and make the changes that I can. So many people care about the mountains, but they don’t know how to make a change.

There’s hope in terms of what you can do. I rent my clothes, I drive an electric car, I eat less meat and this winter I used the snow train to get out to the Alps. It’s about purpose over perfection, adapting your expectations and making a few sacrifices.

I 100% fear for my sons’ future in skiing. There’s no way they could lead the life that I did as a professional skier. I used to fly to New Zealand to ski every summer, but that’s not something I’m going to encourage to my children because it’s not good for the planet.

So we’re just enjoying every moment on the snow that we can right now because we know that those moments aren’t infinite.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/winter-sports/68151487?xtor=AL-72-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bmicrosoft%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bsport%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D

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Your shallowness disgusts me, Ms Alcott.

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Do you have any idea of what the Alps were like before the glaciers began to retreat two hundred years ago?

Did you know that glaciers had advanced so far that Chamonix was described in the 16thC “as a poor country of barren mountains never free of glaciers and frosts…half the year there is no sun…the corn is gathered in the snow…and is so mouldy it has to be heated in the oven. A place covered with glaciers…often the fields are entirely swept away and the wheat blown into the woods and onto the glaciers”

Did you know that in the 17thC glaciers relentlessly pushed downslope ruining thousands of acres of farm land and leaving many villages uninhabitable such as La Bois where a government official noted “where there are still six houses. all uninhabited save two, in which live some wretched women and children…Above and adjoining the village there is a great and horrible glacier of great and incalculable volume which can promise nothing but the destruction of the houses and lands which still remain”?

The same official visited the hamlet of La Rosiere in 1616 and found" “The great glacier of La Rosiere every now and then goes bounding and thrashing or descending…There have been destroyed 43 journaux of land with nothing but stones, and 8 houses, 7 barns and 5 little granges have been entirely ruined and destroyed”.

Did you know that between 1627 and 1633 Chamonix lost a third if its land through avalanches, snow, glaciers and flooding, and the remaining hectares were under constant threat.

Did you know that by then people near the ice front were planting only oats and a little barley in fields that were under snow for most of the year? Their forefathers had paid their tithes in wheat. Now they obtained but one harvest in three and even the grain rotted after harvesting. The people who lived there were described as “so badly fed they are dark and wretched and seem only half alive”.

Did you know that Alpine villagers had to live on bread made from ground nutshells?

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That is the harsh reality of those glaciers you would love to see return.

Yet all you are concerned about is being able to ski down them.

Your idea of sacrifice is to take the snow train to the Alps! You have not got the faintest idea what sacrifice really involves.

NOTES

All historical references are from Brian Fagan’s excellent book, The Little Ice Age.