The Crystal Hunters of Chamonix

“Elías was drawn to crystal hunting as an antidote to conventional alpinism, which in his view had become all about speed. ‘With alpinism today, the goal is to spend as little time as possible in the mountains,’ he told me later. ‘As a cristallier, you spend real time in the mountains. Days, days, days. That changes everything. It changes your relationship with the geography.’”