Thursday was the day I had really been looking forward to all week. All the weather forecasts I had seen predicted it would be the best day of our short stay in Geneva, and my plan was to use it to visit Mount Salève, the mountain immediately above Geneva.

April is pretty much the worst time you could choose to go to Switzerland, by virtue of everything exciting being closed. With the exception of very high altitude resorts such as Zermatt, the skiing season is essentially over and the hiking season can not begin in earnest until June when the majority of the slush will have melted. April is just about the most dangerous time you could go up a mountain; the melting snow is ripe for avalanches and there is still enough of it left in terms of volume to cause some nasty damage. Avalanches are quite cool to watch from a distance but I have no desire to be in the close vicinity of one, and so it was that the region’s more exciting day trips (an excursion to Mont Blanc, for example) had to be ruled out (more…)