Last week, work took me to Geneva, and I stayed the weekend to explore the Alps. On Sunday, we headed southeast to hike the mountains around Chamonix. We crossed the border into France and drove into the valley. Below the snowcapped peaks, the treeline was a rich dark green; orange and yellow foliage covered the mountain skirts. A glacier like a heavy gray tongue snaked down between two sharp peaks -- the Mer de Glace.
We wandered briefly into town. Chamonix seemed well-equipped, quaint, and fast asleep. The ski season doesn't start until December, and the lifts were down. Most of the official 9,000 residents appeared to be either elsewhere or hybernating. Except for a few tourists milling about by the train station, the town was eerily quiet. We followed one of the ski lifts uphill until we found the hiking trail that leads to the edge of the glacier. A few hours later, just before dusk, we had this bird's eye view of the town at the bottom of the valley:
Chamonix is a highly seasonal town -- alive in summer, when outdoors activities attracts lovers of extreme sports, and then again in winter, as a premier winter sports resort. During both seasons, visitors and seasonal residents breathe new life into the the town. Stores and cafés are opened, shelves dusted, blinds rolled up. In between, however, the town seems too large for its few souls, like one of those English country estates inhabited by a single family. Only less grandiose. And somewhat cozier.
This ebb and flow is not unique to Chamonix, of course -- any town that depends heavily on seasonal activities will suffer (or enjoy) a sort of urban bipolarity, with steep inclines and declines in population and activity. Larger cities are also affected by seasonal flows, but their economies tend to be more diversified, providing alternative sources of revenue and vitality. Toulouse receives tens of thousands of visitors in summer, and the flow slows to a trickle (by comparison) starting in fall, but tourism is only one of many income-generating activities in the city. Small towns like Chamonix don't have this luxury, and they must often go to great lengths to invent between-season activities to keep financially afloat.
Other towns seem all too content to retreat into the non-summer calm; the island of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts, is renowned for the proud insularity of its year-round residents (The NY Times reported in 2001 that "Nantucket's year-round population of more than 9,000 swells to more than 50,000 in July and August"). After the hike, I get a sense Chamonix natives might also be all too happy with their breaks. When we stop at a local dive for a tasty snack, friends of friends wander in -- a real local and his partner -- and I sense in them the same ambiguity towards the acute seasonality of the place, a mix of impatience for ski season and relief that it hadn't yet arrived.
Chamonix is clearly aware of its yearly economic roller coaster and has taken some steps to smoothen the curve. At the base of the mountain, the tiny Montenvers train runs up steep cog tracks to the edge of the glacier; the train's been there since 1908, but the add-ons -- a museum of local fauna, an exhibit of mountain crystals, a man-made ice grotto with ice statues -- are apparently far more recent. I wonder whether these generate enough revenue to keep the town going between seasons (however small the population). More likely the town council, well accustomed to the town's uphill-downhill lifecycle, tailors its budget to the sharp seasonal effects.
An icy afterthought: after we return to Geneva I read here that every summer workers have to carve out a new grotto because the glacier has been moving around 70m every year -- I wonder if the glacier is snaking further down the mountain or (more likely, given the rates of glacial melt due to global warming) shrinking and retreating. It seems likely that climate change will affect seasonal towns disproportionally -- at least, where the changing temperatures wreak havoc on outdoors activities such as skiing and beach-going.
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