Record heatwave closes Mont Blanc to tourists
Dramatic proof of global warming as peaks begin to crumble in high temperatures and snowline retreats

It figured as a stop on adventurous young men's nineteenth-century Grand Tour, and in summer 300 people might climb it in a single day. This year, for the first time since its conquest in 1786, the heatwave has made western Europe's highest peak too dangerous to climb.

Mont Blanc is closed.

The conditions have been so extreme, say glaciologists and climate experts, and the retreat of the Alps' eternal snows and glaciers so pronounced, that the range - and its multi-billion-pound tourist industry - may never fully recover. The freak weather, with no substantial snowfall since February, means pylons holding up ski-lifts and cable cars may be too dangerous to use next winter, while the transformation of shining mountains into heaps of grey scree and rubble is unlikely to persuade tourists there this summer to return.

From the streets of Chamonix, the bustling resort at its base, Mont Blanc and its outlying peaks, the Aiguille du Midi, Mont Blanc du Tacul and Mont Maudit, rise in a giant curtain usually filling half the sky with dazzling whiteness. This year they are grey with old, dirty ice from which the overlying snow has long melted, while their slopes are being raked by regular fusillades of rocks, some the size of cars, dislodged as the ice surrounding them melts in the heat.
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