Wilderness and change

View of Grand Veymont mountain and the Haut Plateau du Vercors

I have never been to a true wilderness. Aldo Leopold is reported to have said that a true wilderness is where you can travel for two weeks on horseback without seeing any signs of humans (as told by Jeff Turner in his film The Last Grizzly of Paradise Valley shown recently on BBC TV).

The closest I have come to that increasingly hard to find place is the Haut Plateau du Vercors in southern France. As can be seen from the photo above, it is pretty empty of people except for the few shepherds who spend the summer in these mountain pastures. Although you can't travel two weeks on horseback without seeing signs of humans, you can get lost for several weeks as one unfortunate hiker managed to do a couple of years back. You may, if you are lucky, be able to spend a whole day without seeing a single person.

The Vulture soars

In the summer there are usually a few people passing through, but they do not stay - water being difficult to find up here - and you are more likely to see Marmots, Alpine Ibex, or Chamois. Not forgetting the Vultures (Gyps Fulvus) who glide far and wide over these mountains, their wings making a whistling noise as they pass, just like the gliders manned by human beings which venture up from a little airstrip far below. In bad weather you will find nobody at all, and you would do well to know how to navigate with a compass, because the fog can reduce visibility to a few centimetres. This is why I like this place so much. You can empty your mind here and just be.

This area has never been settled, and even in the lower areas around Vassieux-en-Vercors life is hard and dependent on tourism. The regional nature park status helps no doubt. In prehistoric times this part of the Vercors was of great interest to the humans of the time who would come up from the valleys 1500 metres below to take advantage of the flint deposits to make tools. The flints are particularly large here and can be made into blades measuring up to 25cm long. These blades would have been much sought after, as weapons, tools or prestigious gifts. This would have been a summer activity and the flint makers would have made their way back down at the end of the season laden with the blades and tools they had crafted.

Then one day they stopped. We can see where they worked to this day at the museum (worth a visit) which has been set up to preserve this precious vestige of our distant ancestors. The remains of partly worked tools are still there where they were left by some craftsman thousands of years ago. Did they intend to come back ? No doubt bronze had arrived and it was no longer worth their while coming up here for flints. It was the end of the flint makers.

This is a touching reminder that there have been upheavals of this kind throughout the history of our species. The frequency of these changes, or creative destruction, as Schumpeter puts it, has no doubt been increasing over the centuries. In our time it seems that change is becoming exponential, hour by hour, a seething maelstrom. If you look away for 2 seconds, the world and everything in it will have changed. But of course some things seem to remain unchanged nevertheless, such as this landscape of mountain meadow and high altitude forest and the caves used by man before history. Long may it be so.

Musée de la Préhistoire - Vassieux en Vercors http://www.prehistoire-vercors.fr/
Parc régional naturel du Vercors http://parc-du-vercors.fr/fr_FR/index.php