Aiguille du Midi

Where it sits. The Aiguille du Midi is a granite spire of 3,842 metres standing on the northern edge of the Mont Blanc massif, directly above Chamonix and about eight kilometres from the summit of Mont Blanc itself. It is the highest and most prominent of the Aiguilles de Chamonix, the row of needles that separates the valley from the ice fields behind them, and its position is the reason it matters: it stands at the point where the rock ridge breaks and the Vallée Blanche, the huge upper basin feeding the Mer de Glace, opens out to the south. From the summit terrace the ground falls away 2,800 metres to the town on one side and rolls out as an unbroken glacier plateau on the other. The summit is in fact two rock peaks, the northern and the central, joined by a footbridge and honeycombed with tunnels and lift shafts.

The cable car that changed the massif. The téléphérique was conceived by the Italian engineer and industrialist Dino Lora Totino and completed in 1955, after four years of construction in which materials were flown and hauled to a site with no road, no water and no shelter. It climbs in two stages: Chamonix at 1,035 metres to Plan de l'Aiguille at 2,317 metres, then a second span to the upper station at 3,777 metres. That second stage crosses 2,867 metres of open air without a single intermediate pylon, and the total rise of 2,807 metres remains the greatest vertical gain of any cable car anywhere. The whole journey takes about twenty minutes, which is the source of both its appeal and its principal hazard: passengers go from valley air to just under 3,800 metres faster than the body can adapt, and headaches, nausea and breathlessness are routine. Inside the rock, a lift completed later carries visitors the final 65 metres to the true summit terrace. In 1958 a second system, the Panoramic Mont-Blanc gondola, was strung five kilometres south across the Vallée Blanche to Pointe Helbronner on the Italian border, a crossing that operates only in the warmer months.

On screen. The Aiguille has been filmed more often as an instrument than as a subject. Marcel Ichac's Les Étoiles de midi (1959) was made possible by the new lift, which let a camera crew reach high granite for the first time, and mountaineering documentary has used the station as a base ever since; the glass box installed on the north face in December 2013, the Pas dans le Vide, with a thousand metres of air beneath its floor, has generated more footage than any single structure in the Alps. It is worth being precise about a common confusion: the ski chase in The World Is Not Enough (1999) was shot in the Chamonix valley below and on its ski terrain, not on the Aiguille, and the Vallée Blanche has never been the setting for a feature-film chase, because getting a camera crew onto crevassed glacier at 3,600 metres remains slow, expensive and dangerous work.

What you actually see today. The upper station is a small town inside a mountain: two terraces, a tunnel gallery cut through the rock, a restaurant, an exhibition on the construction, and the glass cube. On a clear day the view runs from the Grandes Jorasses and the Dent du Géant east to the Matterhorn and the Monte Rosa group, with Mont Blanc filling the south-west. Temperatures at the top sit ten to fifteen degrees below the valley and the wind is constant, so a fleece and gloves are needed even in August. From the ice ridge below the terrace, the arête, roped parties set off down the Vallée Blanche — in summer to climb, in winter for the twenty-kilometre glacier ski descent to Chamonix or Montenvers. That ridge is genuine glacier terrain, not a viewing platform, and stepping onto it without a rope and a guide is the single most common serious mistake made here.

Getting there and timing. The valley station is a ten-minute walk from the centre of Chamonix. Tickets are timed and sell out on clear summer days, so booking a slot online the previous evening is close to essential in July and August; the first departures, from around seven in the morning in high season, get the stillest air and the cleanest light. The lift usually closes for several weeks of maintenance in the autumn and can shut at any time for wind. Because the cable car makes 3,842 metres available to anyone who can stand in a queue, it is the single most useful reminder in the Alps that altitude does not care how you arrived at it: budget an hour at the top, move slowly, and go down if your head hurts.