About
It is a directory of published notices, not a safety service. It reports what lift operators, mairies, hut federations and booking systems have actually said, links every claim back to whoever said it, and never makes a claim of its own. It does not know whether a route is safe, and it will not tell you whether to go. A status here can be out of date — every row shows when it was published and when we last confirmed it, and where we have nothing it says so rather than staying quiet.
If you are here from your server logs
You have seen a request from massif/0.1 (+https://montblancmassif.org/about; steven@innes.io) and want to know what it is. It is this site, collecting whatever you publish about lifts, huts and mountain routes so that people can find it in one place, with a link back to you.
- robots.txt is honoured, and a robots.txt we cannot read is treated as a refusal rather than as permission. Two hosts refuse us and are not fetched at all.
- At least two seconds between requests to the same host, always, regardless of how many pages we want.
- Most sources are read once a week, a few daily, and only the live lift feed more often than that. Nothing is crawled broadly: we fetch a known list of pages, not your whole site.
- We keep a copy and re-read that, not you. Every page fetched is stored, and when the parser improves it is re-run over the stored copies. Improving how we read your site costs you no traffic at all.
- Everything is attributed and linked back to the page it came from, on every row that uses it.
If you would rather we did not, email steven@innes.io and we will stop, or add a Disallow for us in your robots.txt and we will stop by ourselves on the next run. You do not need to justify it and we will not ask you to.
Where the information comes from
- Mairie de Saint-Gervais — Arrêtés — legally binding closure decrees, which is why they outrank everything else here. The Goûter route regulation comes from here.
- Compagnie du Mont-Blanc — Live lift status and the seasonal calendar for the Chamonix valley lifts and mountain railways.
- FFCAM — Warden seasons for the federation's own refuges — Goûter, Tête Rousse, Argentière, Couvercle and the rest.
- hut-reservation.org — The Swiss Alpine Club booking platform, for the Trient and Orny huts.
- Tour du Mont-Blanc — Hut availability on both sides of the border — the only source here that carries French, Italian and Swiss refuges in one place.
- Tramway du Mont-Blanc — The operator's own timetable for the tramway.
- Refuges.info — A volunteer-maintained directory: hut capacities, wardening, water, and the state of a few huts nobody else reports on. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0, which is a condition rather than a courtesy: every row links back to the individual entry its author wrote.
- Camptocamp — Hut descriptions, and dated condition reports written by people who were actually on the route. Used under CC BY-SA, which is a condition rather than a courtesy: every row links back to the individual entry its author wrote.
Two dates, not one
Every status carries when the source published it and when we last checked it still stood. They are different facts and conflating them hides the one that matters: a decree from three months ago that we confirmed an hour ago is current, and a lift status from this morning that we have not re-read since is not. Rows aged past what their kind of notice holds for are marked OLD; rows we are overdue to re-read are marked OVERDUE.
Something wrong?
A wrong status is worth telling us about, and so is a hut or lift we are missing, or an attribution we have got wrong. Report it here — it takes a couple of clicks and goes to a public issue tracker, or to email if you would rather.
Who runs it
One person, as a personal project, with no commercial interest in any lift, hut or guiding company. The code is public at github.com/Deltaspace2/massif — including every source it reads and the rules it applies to them, so anything on this page can be checked rather than taken on trust.