There are many hollow cavities shafts and shifting sands beneath its surface

There are many hollow cavities, shafts, and shifting sands beneath its surface. We are afraid that we are heading for some kind of huge catastrophe unless something is done.” Mr Mikhailov argued that the entire area beneath the city needed to be properly surveyed and a new geological map of subterranean Moscow drawn.. Mont Blanc, “the white mountain”, sprawls magnificently astride the French-Italian border, rising ridge upon ridge to reach the highest point in western Europe. The mountain’s permanent snows and glaciers have made it a symbol of wild beauty and shining purity since Roman times No more.

So popular has it become with climbers – virtually a climbing package tour destination – that the “white mountain” could be renamed the “grey and yellow” mountain, according to one enraged local politician.
Glaciers have been so polluted with urine that they have turned yellow. Rubbish and excrement is strewn the length of many of the most popular climbing routes. Even a washing- machine was recently found on the hallowed slopes.Jean-Marc Peillex, the mayor of the French commune of Saint-Gervais, which includes the 4,808-metre (15,780ft) peak, believes that it is time to save the highest point in the Alps from becoming a mountain of rubbish. He has called a meeting next week to discuss the possibility of issuing paid-for licences to anyone who wishes to climb on Mont Blanc.His proposal has provoked a storm of protest from guides and climbers, for whom mountaineering is one of the last frontiers of adventure and freedom.

The idea of licensed mountain-climbing – although already imposed by the Nepalese authorities on Everest and other Himalayan peaks – is a nonsense, they say. Paid-for licences and even “reserved climbing slots” would be an unwelcome intrusion by officialdom into the pure air of the high mountains.”They want to put the police on our backs even on the summits of the Alps It’s an outrage,” said Eric, a mountaineer from Paris. “It’s completely against the spirit of the mountains, which must remain a place of natural beauty, accessible to everyone.”But this, says M Peillex, who is a famously outspoken man, is bunk. Natural beauty and freedom are not compatible with “traffic jams” of climbers and heaps of refuse.”The legendary climb to the peak of Mont Blanc is becoming a piece of cut-price, consumer goods,” he says. “In the four months from June to September, nearly 30,000 people try to reach the roof of western Europe.”Mont Blanc climbs are already being sold at knock-down prices in former Communist-bloc countries in eastern Europe. How many people can we expect when the tourist market opens up to the vast populations of India or Asia as a whole? Fifty thousand a year, 100,000? I don’t want to see the day when 200,000 Chinese are climbing Mont Blanc.”The mayor’s idea – and the faint scent of xenophobia in his words – has annoyed some local people and visitors alike. Villages on the Italian side of the mountain, a much less popular approach route to the peak, are horrified by suggestions that they already have too many visitors.

Their income from tourism has been falling, they say.Other local observers agree with M Peillex that something must be done. Olivier Curral is the caretaker of the mountain refuge at Go?, at 3,817 metres, the last official resting place before the assault on the summit of Mont Blanc.The problems are caused, he says, by young, foreign climbers who cannot afford – or refuse to pay – the €25 (£17) a night to stay in the refuge. “They camp sometimes for several days waiting for a break in the weather. Some of them respect the mountain and bring their rubbish back with them and use our toilets,” he says “Others just leave their refuse beside their camp sites. As you climb that way, you see patches of urine and excrement everywhere in the snow.