The Col du Granier: The Mountain That Fell on the Villages

Required Activities

• Drive the D912 over the col at 1,133 m with the 900-metre north wall of the Granier above you to the south-east, then turn round on the spot and find the other three horizons the col opens on: the trouée des Marches and the Bauges to the north-east, and east across the combe de Savoie to the Belledonne chain and the Grand Arc

• Take the short path west from the col up to the panoramic point that looks across the sunny side of the pointe de la Bornée, and pick out where the Tour de Chartreuse long-distance path runs below you

• Go down into the abymes below the col, where 500 million cubic metres of mountain came to rest over some 23 square kilometres, and find the Pierre Hachée at Myans — a single block of more than a thousand cubic metres that rolled five kilometres to get there — then walk round the lac de Saint-André, a hollow in the debris that filled with water beside the spot where the village of Saint-André is buried

• Taste an Apremont and an Abymes side by side in a cellar at Apremont, both grown on ground that has been under vine since the early 1300s because the rockfall left it too broken for anything else — and work out the swap while you do it: the mountain used to be called Apremont and took the name of the buried village of Granier, while the village built on the rubble took the mountain's old name

• At Myans, go into the sanctuary of Notre-Dame — the building the monks were sheltering in when the mountain came down — and then name the five parishes that were buried whole: Cognin, Vourey, Saint-André, Granier and Saint-Pérange, with Myans and Les Murs only half destroyed