Just a handful of quick shots from the Vanoise National Park in the French Alps over the last few days. It’s end of season really so a bit of snow isn’t unusual, these are taken walking from the refuge at the Col de Vanoise descending to the Pralognan.

And I’ve walked past this via ferrata before, I’d thought about bringing some gear and doing it when I’d finished the hut-to-hut trip but it looks busy so I think the quick ascent I’d thought of wouldn’t have worked out.

Interesting article in Macworld. This is the same Demandmedia who were engaged in systematic unauthorised reuse of images using Bing to automate their process, I wrote about this a while back :

snowslider – unauthorised image reuse by demandmedia and livestrong.com

According to Macworld one security group rate Demandmedia as the worst ISP in the world and suggest that Demandmedia “just don’t give a damn”

This all seems pretty consistent with my experience with them and the attitude their support had.

I reckon Dent de Broc is about the closest peak to the house, it’s certainly the closest to the house that I’d not been up before. Although it’s a fairly modest height it’s a slightly daunting proposition as there’s no major path up it and it’s unrelentingly steep. It was already 30′C at the bottom so it promised to be a long, hot climb.

And it didn’t disappoint, the path starts off just heading straight up the hill for the first 45 minutes or so before relenting and dropping into an easier set of switchbacks through the forest before breaking out onto the high meadows. I’d heard voices as I was going up calling out so I wasn’t surprised to meet some people moving some cows between different meadows. There’s no track up here so they’d walked up the same way I did, not just the people but most probably the cows as well.

On reaching the col, a 100m below the summit, you get some views across the local area and you see this familiar “U” shaped feature on a lot of the summits that’s so distinctive of the peaks around here.

For variety I decided to descend the other side of the actual summit to join a path to the town of Broc (above) which sits at the side of Lac Gruyére. I’d stopped to sit on an old log in the shade to eat my lunch and found this frog had beat me to the shady spot. He stuck around long enough for a photo’ before moving on though.

I also ticked the geocache GCP9VD while I was passing, as this requires a significant walk I was only the second person this year to go there and one of only 17 since 2005 when it was placed. Something of a contrast from some of the ones near car parks that get half a dozen visits every weekend. In fact, I’d taken the even harder approach by going up and over the Dent de Broc. This cache gets a terrain rating of 4/5 for the difficulty of the approach, I’m thinking of not doing any that are easier than 3/5 in future.

I think they look like characters on the muppets! I’d mentioned a while back there was some storks along the road and they’ve been raising some young so often when I’m passing there’s three or four on the nest but I’ve not had a camera with me until today.

This is Avenches, it’s the capital of the old Roman province that was here around the 1st and 2nd century AD. There’s an opera festival on at the moment which is why the amphitheater is all kitted out with seats.

As we walked through town a couple of the storks were flying, I’d removed my longer lens at that point so I only got this distance shot. Just for context, here’s the roof the storks have taken up residence on.

I was in the UK for a bunch of things for the last couple of weeks, one of which was my SPA assessment which I’m pleased to say I passed with the excellent (as usual) Phil George. I had some time over the weekend to go out with a group from the Walking Forum website in Snowdonia. I think one plan had been to use the common and busy track up from Pen Y Pass but someone had the idea of using the Rhyd Ddu track instead which suited me well as I was staying at the Oread Mountaineering Club hut just at the start of the track.

It’s a good track and a lot less busy than any of the others so although we saw people on the way up it wasn’t excessive.

Once of the younger members of our group above just near the top wrapped up against the chill breeze just at the summit and a crowded summit. I found the summit unpleasant, less for the crowds and more for the general hygiene, I’ve been up there a few times in the last year or two and been appalled by this, I can’t face eating my lunch there and I need to wash my hands as soon as we’re clear of the crowds.

We took the less used track down towards Y Aran, we were the only people who followed this all the way to Rhyd Ddu so it was really, really pleasant.

xxx

Apparently at this point Julie hadn’t realised we were aiming to climb the peak on the right by the left hand ridge, I didn’t know that until we got back to the car and I looked back at the peak and commented it looked steep and Julie was amazed we’d done it.
It was a quick start into steep ground and it was overhanging in places making it quite physical.

The ladders always intrigue me, I’ not sure if they come from the local DIY store or from some specialised supplier. They’re useful in situations like this on a very, ver steep grass bank though.

There’s some great views on the way up and although it’s not ultra steep all the way there’s a few more steep sections so we’re both pretty pumped by the top.

On the summit it’s quite cool which is welcome to cool off so we unrack all our climbing gear and have a sandwich before heading down and out along another ridge to drop into the next valley and loop round to the car.

Making it a circular route adds quite a lot to the day I think, it’s good weather for walking and the scenery is great.

And finally, back at the car looking back at Gantrisch. There’s a little mountain restaurant so we have a welcome cold drink and head home.

It’s probably overdue that some consideration is given to limiting what these large lift companies in these mega-domains are up to, successive years of bad financial results for some of the companies while others are traded like chips in some environmental poker game makes you wonder what the point of it all is. Trashing the mountain environment so people on ski holidays wait one minute less for a lift or encouraging the sad and dull pursuit of ever more mileage for the “intermediate” skier is really too high a price to pay. It’s pretty obvious skiing can be carried out without destroying the mountain completely and if that means alienating a portion of the mass-market then I can’t see it’s any great loss. Financial considerations mean skiing’s never been particularly inclusive so a few less lifts and a definitive end to heli-skiing would be no bad thing.

Passing into the national park area and I’m into a cleaner mountain environment. There’s still a lot of snow on the ground though and it’s hard work moving through it. In fact, I’m surprised to reach the col de La Leisse in ten minutes less than I’d estimated.

A view up onto the Grande Motte with the summer ski operation all ready to go next weekend. And looking down the valley where the refuge is hidden over behind the lake.

About 1100m before the Refuge de la Leisse the clouds are looking fairly ominous, it’s here at the Plan des Nettes the first photo’ is taken in fact. My first thought is I can reach the hut before it really starts to rain but suddenly it starts to pour down with a mixture of rain and hail so I’m forced to put some more clothes on. By the time I’ve geared up and then walked 600m the rain stops so had I left just a couple of minutes sooner I’d have missed the rain altogether.

I’m the only person staying in the Refuge de la Leisse and I think they’re surprised to see me, even though I’d rung them to book I think they assumed the poor weather would stop me making it. As I’m the only person I eat with the guardian, his wife, 17 month old son and cat, the downside of course is that the dormitory is empty so it’s a pretty cold night on my own.

Next morning I head over the col de Vanoise, it’s a bit lower than the col de La Leisse so there’s not quite the snow on the ground.

I spent the night at the refuge des Barmettes which is actually pretty comfortable. The food was excellent and being close to the ski station of Pralognan they’ve full main services.

Originally I’d planned to go over the Grand Bec and use the winter room at the refuge but the snow is too much and the weather is worse so I head down to Pralognan and look for a way to get to Moutiers. There’s no bus until the following day and they reckon a taxi is 60€ which seems a bit expensive so I decide to walk on the old road down to Bozel and see what the options there are. In Bozel there’s no bus for 6 hours so I decide to get a taxi and ask the tourist office if they’ve a number, after trying a local number but getting no response one of the staff offers to take me to Moutiers in her car, it was lunch time and she lived near the station so it was on her way.

From Moutiers it’s a train to Bourg St Maurice but it turns out the bus to Tignes only runs if you’ve reserved which of course I’ve not and there’s no sign of the bus. Another two passengers though have reserved although but the bus company has no record of it so we persuade them to run the bus and a coach with three of us on it heads up to Tignes via Val d’Isere. I’m pretty pleased with this, I’ve managed to get from Pralognan to Tignes for 15€ in about 5 hours which is pretty good. Picking the car up I drive back down the hill and I see a couple of people at the side of the road hitching a lift, having got a free ride earlier it’s karma that I have to stop and give them a ride. It turns out it’s a local girl needs a lift, she’d been waiting for the bus I’d just got off to return to the valley and it sailed by her without stopping completely empty which was ironic.

Gastlosen is one of the biggest sports climbing crags around here, in fact one of the bigger ones in Switzerland really. This is a poor photograph really, I ought to have taken one from the parking or a bit further away. We just climbed in the first sector nearest the parking known as Gravière for all the scree underneath.

I’ve got some older photographs and you can start to see what an amazing area this is for climbing, it’s a long ridge with climbing either side. We were on the eastern side of the north-south running ridge but there’s climbing on the western side as well.

These two (above) photographs are taken from the western side near Chalet du Soldat which is a good base to climb on that end of the ridge.

Some more wintery shots from the eastern side taken in October 08 and March 09

A couple of weeks ago I noticed visits from a domain called “livestrong.com”, which I’d never heard of, visiting a page on SwissMountainLeader about the flower butterbur. I was curious so I visited the site and found a very lightweight page with a couple of lines of text about butterbur in the context of a herbal remedy and one of my photographs at the bottom of the page. I was pretty unhappy about that,  my photographs are copyright using a Creative Commons license called Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. That’s a standard license and it means, for example, if you want to link to those images on Facebook to show your friends that’s perfectly fine, but if you’re going to use my images for anything that makes you money or is any kind of commercial activity then that’s not allowed. The difference is about whether the reuse of the images is what we call fair use or not.

As Livestrong.com were using my images in a commercial context then it wasn’t fair use and I don’t really want my material to be used to promote herbal remedies. Companies do this from time to time and I send them a note asking them to pay for the use of my images or remove them, it’s exceptionally rare that those companies don’t correct their error and remove the image.

But Livestrong.com made it clear they’d no intention at all of voluntarily removing the images. Their first response was to refer me to their terms and conditions which required me to make a lengthy formal complaint to their copyright agents (demandmedia). I thought this was outrageous, at no time had I accepted their terms and conditions nor could their unauthorised use of my work be deemed as my acceptance of their terms and conditions. Their later response was so very absurd and unreasonable I’ll just reproduce it here :

We pull our photos from Google images. If you do not want to have your photos indexed by Google, please use the link below to remove yourself from the indexing.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35308

As Google, and other search engines make clear, the fact material is indexed by them doesn’t alter copyright and images in particular may be subject to copyright. I note that Livestrong.com are indexed by Google and make copyright statements on their site, statements that are misleading and incorrect as it’s not their content at all.

Many further requests and complaints to them didn’t elicit any response at all. I’ve never personally encountered an attitude like this to image reuse, livestrong.com and demandmedia seem to acknowledge they were using my material but seem confident there’s little I can do about it and seem to view Google Images as being a library for material to build their websites.

In fact, it transpires that livestrong.com support staff aren’t really on the ball and they’re not using Google Images at all. I looked at their webpage and worked out what they’re doing.

For any given search term, for example “butterbur”, they take the top 5 or 10 images from a search using Bing Image Search, not Google, and just embed the thumbnails from Bing with links back to the sites the images were taken from. Those links are labelled as “nofollow” so they’re not rated by search engines to increase your own site authority. This explains why they didn’t just remove the image when I’d asked which had really puzzled me, I’d assumed it was a static page and even though they’d been using my image that there was some amount or research or original work but it turns out to be nothing more than a automated process.

I’d assumed this was originally some sort of oversight but it now transpires that livestrong.com and demandmedia are engaged in the systematic, large-scale reuse of other peoples images using Bing Image search as an image library to build web pages with practically no original content. All you need to do to be a victim of livestrong.com and demandmedia is have work captioned or titled with a search term they’ve targeted and to have your original work rated as being highly relevant by Bing searches and your images will appear on their website with no benefit to you.

I’m surprised Bing allow this, I’m delighted Bing had placed some of my work at the top of their search listing and I like what they’ve done with the search engine a lot, but if Bing is going to be used for automated, large-scale, systematic image theft then it really undermines their brand.

This was a slightly optimistic route plan, I’d wanted to go and look at a small valley just under the Grand Muveran. I’d planned to walk up the vallon de Nant then cross the col under the Pointe des Savolaires. In the event snow forced me to turn around just short of 2000m, the amount of snow on the ground was becoming a problem and I’d no way of knowing how much snow I’d experience on the other side of the col so I was aware that each metre I was moving up through the snow was a metre I was likely to have to descend. The weather also altered and it started to snow heavily so it wasn’t too pleasant.

Probably though the largest objective risk of the day was my lunch stop, there’s a small wooden building at around 1800m which was open at the front something like a terrace. That seemed a good sheltered place for lunch but as I sat there I started to hear the wood creaking alarmingly and realized the open front was due to the fact the front wall had fallen out. In fact it looked the building had started to fall down so I went to sit somewhere else in case it finished falling down while I was sat there.

It’s a nice valley, classic glacial formations and some high pasture although it’ll be some time before they move cattle up here.

Some signs of the avalanche debris from the winter, there’s some curiously deceptive slopes above here, at a quick glance you’d not see the steepness of the slopes but as I’d already looked at the map I was aware of the angles of the slopes.

As for the plant, ironically it’s a butterbur, not quite the same as the white butterbur on SwissMountainLeader but a butterbur anyway. Why’s that ironic? Because livestrong.com have stolen that butterbur image for their site and refused to remove it when asked, rather than remove the image they’ve suggested I remove my sites from Google so they can’t find them when searching for other peoples images to reuse or that I read their terms and write to them with a load of documentation after which they’ll investigate. Apparently their unauthorized reuse of my image implies I’ve accepted their terms and conditions in their bizarre view of the world. It’s appalling behavior I think and their attitude is odious, they’ve acknowledged it’s my image but they’ve made clear they’ve no intention of removing it unless they’re forced to by legal means. Personally I think instead of paying retainers for lawyers and copyright agents they should not use other peoples work without permission and when they’re caught doing it they should behave with some integrity instead of defining their conduct by what they can get away with or be forced to do.

A great photo of the path, just after getting through the avalanche debris at around 1700m.