vertigo

Chamonix. France. August 3, 2003. (Also Full Size)

amazing things

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ !

mont blanc = james bond

I think there is a special European drive to create novel means of transportation. In America we have our awesome superhighways—in one place I counted 26 lanes!— but in comparison to the téléphériques and long distance tunnels of the Alps, our highways exhibit no creativity. You wouldn't know it, but an autoroute superhighway passes directly through central Geneva. It is underground.

The above diagram depicts the most James Bond thing I have ever seen. I cut it out of some pamphlet and pasted it into my notebook for preservation. You can cross the Alps entirely by cable car. As I understand it, there's a passport check way up on the glacier as you cross, dangling from a steel cable, into Italian airspace. You take a series of cable cars, up from the French town of Chamonix to some intermediate step. After another cable car journey you come upon this platform, then walk across a wooden bridge spanning the chasm between two mini-alps. Into a tunnel borne into the rock. An elevator up through the center of the rock, to the top, where, for good measure, there is a huge spire mounted. I believe it is actually an ICBM. The photo posted previously (under "vertigo") is taken from the platform at #10, looking at the platform labelled #1.

( notebook entry )