Peyrepertuse 1996
The Cathar country in the foothills of the French Pyrenees is one of my favourite places. I first went there in 1992 while living in Montpellier, then again in 1996, 2002 and most recently in 2011 with my family. I have pulled together a few photos from these trips and this first post features Château de Peyrepertuse and the nearby Château de Quéribus. Continue reading
I’m new to this blogging stuff, and I’ve decided to rearrange the furniture before I’ve settled in too comfortably and collected lots of junk. So I have moved my blog as follows
new domain: mountainsrivers.com from old domain colinmathers.wordpress.com
I’ve asked wordpress.com to move my loyal followers from the old domain to the new domain. If that doesn’t happen soon, you can just press the button to follow this blog. I also had another domain name colinmathers.com associated with the old blog. I am now using that for a different blog on professional stuff. So if you bookmarked that, it will go somewhere else now.
Sorry for all the confusion. now that I have rearranged the furniture, I’ll start hanging up some nice artwork.
I started this blog with theme Twenty Twelve but did not like the fact that the menus were above the header image. So I have changed it to Twenty Ten which has the menus under the header image. Twenty Ten also allows random display of a selection of header images, and I’ve set it up to display among six images, all photos I have taken (except the one of me underwater). My only irritation so far with Twenty Ten is that it does not allow larger header images like Twenty Twelve, but I can live with that. Remains to see whether I find other limitations.
During the first year after I moved to Geneva, I did a rafting trip down the Dranse river which is in the French Alps about 30 km from Geneva. It starts in the Portes du Soleil ski area and runs down to the Lake at Thonon Les Bains. The Dranse has class 3 rapids which become class 4 when the water volume is high. Before we set off in the raft, the guide checked our ability to survive a capsize by getting each of us to swim through the first rapid. We were hooked and as we headed back towards Thonon afterwards, we saw a kayaking shop and went in and bought inflatable kayaks. The following photos are from a trip on the middle Dranse in 2001. Continue reading
The tale of how a Scottish Mathers killed and ate one of his enemies was discovered by my father when he was reading a Scottish novel from his Uncle John’s library (John Melrose Mathers 1889-1975). He took great delight in the idea that the medieval Scottish ancestors of the Mathers family had been cannibals.
An interesting site full of stories. The following from a friend I used to work with in Geneva, a few years ago now.
Of all the photos I’ve taken in Switzerland, this is one of my favorites. Its taken from the balcony of Hotel Victoria in Glion, a village above Montreux on the northern end of Lake Leman. The Rhone flows down the Valais (towards which we are looking) into Lake Leman and then flows out of the lake at the other end, in Geneva.
The snow-capped mountains in the distance are the Dents du Midi (height 3257 metres or 10,686 feet). Beyond the Dents du Midi are Verbier and the Grand Saint Bernard Pass into Italy.
Having spent Christmas-New Year in Australia, only got onto the snow for the first time last week. Everyone was telling me not to bother as it had not snowed since Dec 13 and the snow was not in good condition. But I woke up on the morning I was heading up to the Juras and checked the snow report to find 4 cm of fresh snow had fallen early that morning. So headed up to the Col de Faucille with the boys to find all the trees covered with a light cover of fresh snow and the skiing was great.
The Juras are to the west of Geneva, and not as high as the Alps. Col de Faucille is about a 30 minute drive from home. The photo on the left shows the view looking across Lake Leman (and the villages north of Geneva) to the Swiss Alps. Altitude is about 1500 m where I took this photo.
From the top of Mont Rond (alt. 1534 m) later in the afternoon we could see the French Alps to the south (near Grenoble) rising out of the clouds:
We skied until it was almost getting dark. Apart from the joy and adrenaline of the skiing, the views and the snowy forests around us were spectacular.
This is my current header image, a photo I took in 2008 at the top station of the Grand Montets ski field, near Chamonix in the French Alps. I am looking towards the Mont Blanc massif from an altitude of 3300 metres (over 10,000 feet). This what skiing is all about: above the clouds, spectacular views and long vertical drops.The Argentiere Glacier is below and behind me. From here its 2,200 metres vertical descent – nonstop skiing if you avoid the crevasses. On my descent, I saw one person ski into a crevasse. But more on that later.
"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" -- William Blake
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