“Three hours ago, near Grenoble, we took pictures against the backdrop of fabulous landscapes, decorated with snakes of ski lifts over bald patches of wooded mountain slopes. Romantic views of the Alpine mountains, familiar from dozens of films, popped up around every turn, the sun danced on the peaked tiled roofs of modern chalets, sparkled in the stained glass windows of roadside taverns and restaurants and played hide and seek with us, diving under openwork bridges over mountain abysses. Everything was cozy, lived-in, civilized, paved, marked with road signs and warningly lined with bridges, tunnels, mesh rockfall barriers and steep catching dead ends. But beyond Chambery, just when the motorway ended and the road, narrowing to a single-lane “goat path”, twisted in the air thinned by the altitude, this is where it all began!..”