Experiencing the exhilaration of standing atop the summit of Mont Blanc in Chamonix, France, the highest peak in the Alps, requires years of training and an expert knowledge of climbing and mountaineering. Or -- thanks to Google Street View: Mont Blanc, which launches Jan. 21 -- a smart phone and WiFi.
Street View, which was first released in the U.S. in 2007, is no longer simply for streets. And its next phase is looking up.
"A lot of folks didn't know there are places on Google Maps you can explore beyond public roads and the exterior of a restaurant you want to visit," says Deanna Yick, Google Street View's program manager for special collections. "We've been putting our efforts toward taking Street View to areas people are interested in, but may never have the opportunity to travel to themselves. Or for an aspiring climber, we can show them places they may one day be able to reach themselves."
Last summer, Google partnered with renowned climbers Alex Honnold, Lynn Hill and Tommy Caldwell to provide its Maps users with a 3,000-foot, 360-degree interactive Street View experience climbing The Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, one of the most iconic rock climbs in the world. For their second act, they traveled to the 15,781-foot peak of Mont Blanc.
Just as they had in Yosemite, Google enlisted some of the most respected and experienced athletes in the area, including legendary Mont Blanc guide Patrick Gabarrou, French rock climber Catherine Destivelle, freeski legend Candide Thovex, Swiss rock climber and mountaineer Ueli Steck, French ski mountaineer Laetitia Roux and Spanish ski mountaineer and runner Kilian Jornet, who in 2013 set the speed record for running up and down Mont Blanc in less than five hours.
"A friend contacted me to tell me about the project and I was immediately charmed by the principle," Roux wrote in an e-mail from France, here translated with help from - ahem - Google Translator. "I wanted to participate in this project because it concerns my life passions: mountain climbing and skiing. It provides an opportunity for people to live the feelings and emotions that I feel in the mountains, to show them its beauty, its vastness, its purity. It is also an opportunity to make them aware that these wild places are magical and we must take care of them if we want to keep them intact so our children will have the chance to see these glaciers too."
When Roux, a 14-time ski mountaineering champion, talks about her involvement in the Street View project, she becomes almost as amped as she does before a challenging climb. "People will be curious and excited to discover this environment in the high mountains," she says. "The environment is attractive, captivating and fascinating, but also hostile, and that requires experience, mastery, physical fitness, and a great will. People will be able to feel the emotions and live a Mont Blanc ascent from the inside. It's an incredible opportunity, to be able to take in the landscape at 360-degrees, as if they were there."
Street View's developers believe images like the ones taken from atop Mont Blanc appeal to two types of people: those who dream to one day set foot on its peak and those who know they never will. "It gives you a deeper level of respect, whichever group you fall into," Yick says. "There are folks like myself who know this community of mountain climbers exist, but have never seen images that capture what they do in this way. It gives you a deeper level of understanding for them as climbers, and for the beauty of this landscape I will never see in person. The image of Ueli Steck ice climbing is particularly breathtaking. It looks fake, like a movie set. You can't believe it's real or that these guys do this -- for fun -- all the time."
Destivelle, 55, in 1992 became the first woman to complete a solo ascent of the Eiger's north face, and she did it in 17 hours during the bite of winter. To capture photos of Mont Blanc for Google, Destivelle climbed to the top of 12,600-foot Aiguille du Midi, one of the most accessible rock-climbing routes in the Alps. The highest cable car tram station in the world sits just a few hundred meters away.
"I come for the granite, which is exceptional here," Destivelle says in a video featured on the Mont Blanc Street View site. "It's always been the rock that inspires me. It's a moment of forgetting yourself. You're free to act however you feel."
Mont Blanc -- and the Aiguille du Midi -- is more than a pretty face. It's also a dangerous, and endangered, landscape. "This imagery isn't just for the climbing community and to provide exposure for the sports and to assist travel enthusiasts," Yick says. "It's also important in terms of climate change. In areas that are this fragile and changing drastically, Street View can be a great way to provide a historical record of what the area looked like at the time we were there, and there is potential to go back and map the area again to show it change over time. It's also great exposure for the organizations that are working to preserve these locations for the time to come."
French freeskiing legend and three-time Winter X Games gold medalist Thovex added some splash to the project by launching tricks off a hand-built kicker and taking a few ski runs down the mountain, sans snow. In prime conditions, it's possible to ski more than 10 miles from the top of Mont Blanc to the town of Chamonix.
When most people hear "Google Street View," the words conjure images of that funny-looking car with the oddly shaped camera perched atop its roof driving around busy city streets. But that camera also comes in a portable version, which Google calls the Trekker. It consists of 15, five-megapixel cameras, each set at different angles, and it fits inside a wearable backpack. "We used that to climb up the trail and to base camp," Yick says. "For steeper locations, we use a tripod with a regular DSLR with a fish-eye lens that is more maneuverable, and we mount it onto the sides of landscapes to collect images." Here, the 2013 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and renowned climbing photographer Renan Ozturk readies a cluster of GoPro cameras.
"I have so many favorite images, but I really love the image of Killian running on the summit," says Mont Blanc Street View project lead Sandy Russell. "The fact that he is able to run in general in those conditions is crazy, and the image is an homage to what he has done and the records he's set. And I love that it was taken on the summit, which is a place that encapsulates what people are trying to do at Mont Blanc."