Desalpe - another year goes by.
I was probably the only person who nearly cried at the annual 'desaples', the descent of the cows to the valley below, on this mountain today. Of course, from a certain point of view the ritual can be seen as a bit emotional. But it's not so much the downhill migration of these magnificent beasts - and they are magnificent, proud and dark and strong - that got to me. It was a memory of many years ago, maybe ten, maybe more, of the last time my father came here. You know those moments, when certain emotions rise suddenly from somewhere and leave you with no escape. My father was a mountain man, at least in spirit, and he loved this mountain in particular. Probably for the almost rhetorical beauty of its landscape, a view that sweeps you over the entire central Rhone valley. I'm not as susceptible to that sort of panorama as he. And I don't have his sort of mountain gait, a weighted one, where you know where you've put the soles of your shoes and look wh
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