Via Unsplash/ @kowalikus
Jean-Marc Peillex, mayor of Saint-Gervais-Les-Bains, a town on the French side, is a practical man. According to the French mayor, climbers of Europe’s tallest peak, Mont Blanc, will soon need to shell out more than just plain guts. Like it or not but a hurdle awaits at the very beginning – a $15,300 deposit to cover possible rescue or, in worst-case scenarios, a funeral. The step may seem discouraging to a few, but the local mayor is absolutely fed up with the “contempt” of risk-taking climbers, reported CNN. In his opinion, there are way too many pseudo-climbers gambling away their lives on the mountain in the name of adventure and adrenaline rushes.
In contrast, the reality is threatening, and recent hot weather conditions have made the climb more perilous than before. “The municipality of Saint-Gervais plans to take measures adapted to the irresponsibility of some and the risks they make rescuers run,” Peillex said in a statement on Twitter. He continued, “It is unacceptable that it is the French taxpayer who bears these costs,” Peillex said, adding that those who do the climb now do so “with death in their backpack.” going by evidence only in the month of July, the mayor charged no less than 50 amateurs who transited the route “playing the latest fashionable game: Russian roulette! “His statement said gendarmes in a helicopter used a megaphone to make a group of Romanian hikers turn back from an attempt to summit Mont Blanc using a megaphone on July 30.
Supporting mayor Peillex is Roberto Rota, the mayor of the ski resort town of Courmayeur, which lies on the Italian side of the mountain. “We, as administrators, can limit ourselves to reporting sub-optimal routes’ conditions, but asking for a deposit to climb to the top is surreal,” he said. “The decision to close a path, a route, is made if there is an objective risk.”
