From September the 27th, for five days, I went trekking in the Mercantour massif with one of my best friend, an American folk I met years ago when we were living in Japan.

Mountains, dressed in autumn color looks like if they were burning, but can quickly get covered with their white coat as it can get close to winter conditions when weather goes bad; offering unique colors, particular lights, with part of the nature preparing for hibernation, it’s a great period to be hiking. As summer vacations were over, most of the lodge where closed so we either camped or stayed in the opened winter shelter part of the lodges and as their was nearly nobody hiking anymore we could experience Mercantour’s wilderness.

This time we split our time into two treks. The first one of two days brought us in the Merveilles valley (Vallée des Merveilles) where we camped. For the second one we went to the Tinée valley for three days to do a loop from Saint-Etienne de Tinée passing by the Rabuons and Vans lakes, staying in lodge’s winter shelter. Each time we enjoyed different weather and landscapes.

IN THE MERVEILLES VALLEY :

Also it snowed few days before, and it was cloudy, there was no wind, and it was neither raining nor snowing, clouds were globally way above the summits, clearing the view and letting us admiring the panoramas; we could comfortably enjoy close to winter conditions.

Chamois
We started hiking up from the Gordolasque valley, and on the way to the Arpette pass we saw several herd of Chamois. It really surprised me! Chamois is a really coward animal quite hard to see and even though you have this chance, it will run away. According to a friend living in the area, Chamois knows when they are inside or outside the national park and their behavior changes whether they are in or out. It is also hard to see them outside of the national park, as hunting is authorized they keep their distance with human. Pretty clever, isn’t it!

But I started to wonder if the fact that this animal was easy to see in the national park was really a good thing. Seeing a Chamois is normally a rare and short experience as it run away immediately. This is exactly what make such instant magical. In the national park this magic completely disappear as they’re too easy to observe. They nearly look like some zoo, used to visitors, or pet animals rather than wild ones. It is just like if the national park normally aimed at preserving nature, transformed wildlife into a thema-park, human-arranged nature, in a word a PARK. The problem is that a park has nothing to deal with nature and that looking at it from this angle we could say that the national park under the cover of protecting it, it’s destroying nature.


This is the subject of a really interesting book I’m currently reading. It has been written by an ecologist, and he is questioning our attitude regarding nature, explaining that in fact we don’t like nature but human-arranged nature : parks (safe, clean, without bugs, with trees perfectly aligned…), and that under the cover of protecting nature we often destroy it. This will be the subject of a future post as his reflection is very interesting.

Engravings
The particularity of the wonder valley is it’s more than 30,000 engravings made by pecking on schist and granite faces polished by glaciers dating from the bronze age (between -1800 and -1500).
For the most part they depict profiles of horns and also knives, teams, halberds, geometric symbols and sometimes anthropomorphic figures. Traditionally seen as a sanctuary, a shrine to the taurus and the earth, the large amount of the inscriptions in such a place still raise many questions. They are studied from the end of the last century and the systematic inventory has been started since 1967.
Reference : Valley of Marvels

Schedules
D1:Vallée de la Gordolasque – Pas de l’Arpette – Merveilles lodge
D2:Baisse du Basto – Baisse de Valmasque – Nice lodge – Vallée de la Gordolasque

for information about the Mercantour read :

• Presentation of the Mercantour massif

Here is the end of the story…