Today we drove around the contournement (the western Geneva ring road) to the French border, and then went along the Annecy Road up the Col de Mont Sion, where we turned south and up hill to reach the Salève, the limestone ridge which overlooks Geneva from the south side, rising 1300 metres, which is nearly 900 metres above lac Léman. We had a picnic lunch in a lay by overlooking lac d'Annecy, the plateau des Glières and the chaine des Aravis mountain rainge, all clearly visible, across the broad valley ten miles across below us.
We then drove up as far as we could and parked next to the restaurant by the France Telecom relay tower, and then walked for an hour along the crest of the ridge, through rich alpine pastures filled with brown cows, treated to a symphony of cowbells tickling, topped exquisitely by a skylark.
I think I had just an ordinary camera last time we were last up here, so I had a feast of photographing the dramatic scenery in every direction, including some good closeups of hang gliders suspended on thermal currents fifty metres or so off the cliff edge where we were standing. At was cool up there, and cloudy, but not overcast, so in every direction the skies looked dramatic.
It's rather a slow drive to get to the top. The alternative is to use the cable car from Veyrier on the border, which is spectacular, but also expensive - fine if you have a tight tourist schedule, but not when you have a leisurely afternoon to savour the breadth of beauty reveal up on high. For anyone confused about the urban geography of Geneva, the view from the Salève is the right remedy, since everything is visible and can be pointed out, like on a relief map. Well, we were, after all, higher than Snowdon is above Caernarfon, lest anyone forget the sheer scale of the landscape here, atop one tiny fragment of the alpine range which runs for several hundred miles across this region.
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