Issue link: http://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25062
The telepherique system spans the deeply carved uncontrolled slopes of fatal couloirs, unmarked cliffs and treacherous seracs. The powder on top was two feet deep, the visi bility nil and the pitch unfathomable. Vast blank spaces were mined with barely concealed rock ridges. During brief lulls in the storm, my friend Raoul and I could glimpse big walls and bowls. There was no discerni ble line between the clouds and snow. We plunged along that phantom boundary like true believers, unknowing and unseeing, through the kind of giddy, tractless backcountry you can only dream about most of the tcme. Somehow we floundered through the fi rst day's whiteout intact, grateful and dazzled. It was late February in the Al ps, with a snowpack severely dissipated by EI Nino, and I'd finally made it to La Grave, "The Grave." What more alluring name for a holiday spot in the high and dangerous mountains could there be? I'd been hearing for years that it was the best lift-served, off-piste skiing in the world. And the night we arrived was auspicious: it was snowing for the fi rst time in five weeks. La Grave is on highway N91 that traverses the massive Oisans Range in the Hautes-Alpes of southern France. The highway runs from the old fortified city of Briancon, over the Col du Lauteret, past l'Alpe d'Huez and on to Grenoble. Italy is only an hour away from La Grave; in the air you can taste the salt and ol ives of the Mediterranean, 200 kilometers south. At 4,800 feet, La Grave (population 600) is spare and blissfully non-resortish. The fromagerie on the highway is a work of art in cheese and bread. It does much of its busi ness on the honor system, with scales and a dish for your money and change. The ancient pale stone and plaster village (9th century) steps steeply up the hillside from the highway, along convulsed single-lane streets and pathways. Romanche river valley to reach the mountains on the other side. The lift was built in 1976 and primarily served summer hikers and climbers-and a smattering of spring skiers-until snowboarders arrived about 10 years ago. "They wanted to go up when the fi rst snow came," Cecile Tonnelier of the famous Edelweiss Hotel told me. "So the lift owner said, 'Sure.' After that the skiers thought, 'If boarders go, why not us?' " Why not indeed? The three-stage cablecar system and two upper-glacier lifts serve some of the most amazing slopes in the world, with 7, 100 total vertical feet and kick-ass pitch. But on our fi rst day, we were two of only 75 people who skied (compared to the 15,000 that day who skiied in other major resorts in the Al ps) . For La Grave, traffic of 2,000 is a monster day, and rare. Why? The French themselves aren't especially attracted to the area-they like the larger resorts with dozens of high-speed lifts and beaucoup de nightlife. And La Grave's lodging can only handle a couple thousand guests at a time, in part because the more traditional townspeople refuse to accept that winter now attracts more business than summer. Some lodges don't open for the snow season at all. Much of the support and promotion for winter sports in La Grave has actually come from relative newcomers like the Tonneliers, who arrived 16 years ago. The element of danger also discourages tourism. These are harsh mountains. By the time we got there, barely halfway through the season, 17 people had already been ki lled in La Grave's Oisans Range. Avalanches claimed most, but the hazards are many-fold. Plunging off unmarked cliffs is appallingly easy; so is getting lost and stranded. And when there's a dearth of snow, rock ridges as sharp as concertina wire lurk like land mines everywhere. On our second day, a ragged sky vented with occasional bolts of sun and more people appeared. We could see pieces of the long spine that divides the area into the Meije and Chancel valleys, 25