a view from out of the cloud

Descending out of the cloud on Carn Dearg, Loch Ossian, March 2016

dolomite

L. Punton, light jet print, 36x28cm, F Marino Bianchi - Cima di Mezzo, 2015

a gift (Mt Blanc)

with thanks to R.F.

mountains without end

My new book, "Lesley Punton - mountains without end" has come back from the printers. Here's a preview of a few spreads from the book. Sandie Macrae, Director of ROOM, and ROOMBOOKS - the gallery's publishing arm, has written the foreword. Thomas A Clark has written an essay on my practice entitled On Looking at Mountains, as has Dr David Watson in his piece Walking as Knowing, and Alec Finlay has contributed a poem Pataphysical Cuillin. Some of my own writings, fragments of which appear within this blog, are included in texts at the end that collectively come under the heading notebook.

ISBN 978-0-9549915-6-2

edition of 1000

64pp, full colour, soft-back, burst bound, lithographically printed, 246x189mm

Contributors (text) Thomas A Clark (UK), Dr David Watson (Australia), Alec Finlay (UK), Sandie Macrae (UK) & Lesley Punton (UK)

Published by ROOMBOOKS

Date : September 2013

£10 + p&p available directly from my website and at Aye Aye Books, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow.

On Climbing the Sierra Matterhorn Again After Thirty-One Years

Range after range of mountains
Year after year
I am still in love

Gary Snyder

stob coire nan lochan

Stob Coire nan Lochan, Glencoe
Image from the SAIS Glencoe

A recent image from the Glencoe Scottish Avalanche Information Service blog showing snow conditions last week on the cliffs below Stob Coire nan Lochan. Springtime hits the mountains late here in Scotland.

armchair mountaineering

L Punton, December 2010

mer de glace

L Punton, approaching storm, Mer de Glace, July 2007

..without knowing where to spot them, one perhaps would not realise that there is actually a group of people out on the ice in the middle of the picture who are on an alpine skills course to learn how to traverse glaciers and to get out of crevasses. The sense of scale is entirely deceptive.

detail of above showing location of walkers.

A few minutes later, the entire valley would be filled with cloud hugging the glacier, heavy rain and powerful winds.

See also my previous post on Ruskin's photographs of the mer de glace to see how much the great sea of ice has shrunk.

born mountaineers

Research by Geoffrey King and Geoff Bailey in the new scientist suggests that humans are ideally suited to mountainous terrain. As a species we're unable to run fast, so wide open plains are not conducive to the survival of humans. But by inhabiting irregular terrain such as mountains and valleys with our ability to scramble and clamber, human beings holds a definite advantage. "Humans are adapted for complex topography" says King. Research also holds that we have tended to cluster around rougher tectonically active landscapes. When Bailey and King superimposed the locations of human fossil sites throughout Africa with satellite images that show the roughness of the land, they found that they lined up neatly.

grindelwald

L Punton, graphite on paper, 2010

summer camp

An image I made from the Aguille du Midi, Mt Blanc, looking down on the tent pits dug by climbers en route to the summit of Mt Blanc, and making the landscape appear pitted by craters. (as a tent geek, I think I managed to spot one of my own tents, a Trango 2, when viewed at full res!)

New Year's Day

New Year's Day 2010 on the summit of Maol Chean Dearg, looking over to Beinn Alligin in Torridon, Scotland

Nord

Our Christmas card for this year is back from the printers...

It depicts a snow covered direction indicator pointing to other Alpine peaks at Les Grands Montets, Chamonix. (photo taken by Jim Hamlyn)

cloud inversion & fogbow on Ben More

The mountain weather forecast suggested that perhaps the only good place to go today would be somewhere in the West Highlands, but south of Lochaber. We've climbed every Munro in Scotland south of Fort William, so Jim & I, unusually, decided to climb one we'd been up before, and ended up climbing Ben More (the Crianlarich one). This paid off as we found ourselves in a wonderful cloud inversion, saw our brocken spectre, and walked up to the col into a fog bow, (also known as a fog dog, cloud bow or white rainbow).

I've seen partial cloud inversions before, but they've been where I've been sandwiched between a high and a low layer of cloud, or have been above low lying mist in valleys, but this was my first bona fide cloud inversion with brilliant blue skies above, the cloud encircling the mountain. What a fantastic thing to experience. The battery on my camera had died, so all these photographs have been taken by Jim.

 

 

 

la jonction

La Jonction is the spectacular meeting place of the Glacier des Bossons and the Glacier de Taconnez on the Massif de Mt Blanc, and this was my first experience of standing upon a glacier. Being the meeting point of two glaciers, this is a heavily crevassed jumble, with creaking ice and occasional falling seracs. The Gite a Balmat, a mere howff amongst some large boulders, is reached just minutes before you reach La Jonction and it was here that, in 1786, Jacques Balmat and Doctor Gabriel Paccard bivvied overnight before making their successful first ascent of Mt Blanc, the view of which dominates the scene beyond.

Looking down a crevasse on La Jonction, July 2007, Photograph courtesy of Jim Hamlyn