I’ve spent a bit of time looking at my portfolio this week, shuffling around certain galleries like my Alpine one. I want to start making gallery edits that are indicative to my style of working across the seasons. With a gallery containing 20 images, of course there is a number of them that required transport, with chairlifts, trains and helicopters all playing some part. There’s even one image in there that simply required me putting down my breakfast bowl of cereal and stop watching CNN for a minute to capture.Out of the 20 images in the gallery though, 7 of them were captured whilst running, a stat that i’m quite proud of. Recent posts across the summer have highlighted the fact that i’ve been attempting to travel as light as possible (like in this post about my f-stop bag), often with me hiking to certain vantage points with my full camera gear or shooting in a more documentary style way with minimal equipment.The image above gravitates from the latter style, With this image of the Cabane d’Orny being taken from below Cabane du Trient up at 3,170m, just after sunrise one Sunday morning in September. I’d initially been invited to join friends to stay the Saturday night up at the Cabane du Trient, but having just flown in from Corsica, time wouldn’t allow to get me up there that evening. With a favourable forecast I had two aims for this morning; catch up with my friends on their way down and grab some sunrise images on the way up.waking up at 4am, I drove over to beautiful little village of Champex-Lac situated at 1500m. With around 1,700m of climbing ahead of me, I set off on the steep path up to La Breya illuminated by my head torch. A few years ago I experienced running through the night armed just with a head torch and the thrill is something that doesn’t go away. Even as I was pushing through the clouds with just a few metres of visibility, adrenaline was flowing through my veins.
Arriving at the lift station of La Breya the path ventures into high alpine territory, but actually becomes much easier to navigate. Despite having another 1,000m to reach the summit, the path seemed to flatten out and with first light approaching, my running partner took some time out to sit for a head torch lit portrait, tail still wagging ferociously.
The dawn of the day gave me a new lease of life and I was able to push on hard, marvelling at the views that were unfolding around me. I’d seen this area of Switzerland from down in the valley before, but the sheer beauty of it up close with the cloud inversion below, really is breathtaking. As with a lot of my light adventures, I was running with only my point and shoot camera, the Sony RX100. With an old Nintendo Wi wrist strap attached to the camera, i’m able to run pretty freely with the camera in the palm of my hand. Despite taking a few bumps along the way, this camera functions amazingly well when you need to be light on your feet but still want quality images.
With the sun now illuminating the sky, all that was left was to make it up to Cabane du Trient. Taking a wrong turning at the previous refuge, i’d ventured onto the glacier and knew that my friends were most probably starting to make their way down on the higher path. This turned out to be the case as arriving up at Trient I found a relatively empty refuge with a quite remarkable view over to Aguille du Tour.
Making my way back down the correct path towards Cabane d’Orny, finally everything aligned and I was able to capture the image that acts as the main focus of today’s blog post. Looking at the image now it could be easy to spot some shortcomings and say how things could have been done better. Of course with a much higher resolution camera and expensive glass this could have been made differently, but that kind of defeats the purpose. The path from Champex-Lac to Cabane du Trient is advertised as a 5hr40 hike. Moving lightly with minimal equipment I was able to get up there in just over two hours, capture the sunrise and cloud inversion, meet up with my friends (I found them at Cabane d’Orny) and give the dog a pretty damn good walk.All before breakfast.
Leave a Reply