Riding long river of snow
SEB RAMSAY heads to Alpe d’Huez where majestic peaks provide a veritable nirvana for fans of mountains
THE summit of the Pic Blanc is truly something else. The panorama from here - the top of the Alpe d’Huez lift network - is one of the true splendours of the French Alps.
Majestic and iconic peaks sprawl as far as the eye can see to all points of the compass. For a mountain fan, this is Nirvana.
The resort team claim you can see 20 per cent of France from here.
Among the innumerable highlights is La Barre des Ecrins - to the south and east and slightly north of that La Meije.
To the north east is the huge Mount Blanc Massif, the Vanoise and Gran Paradiso in Italy.
To the trained eye, Mont Ventoux’s discrete mass can be spotted on a clear day to the south west.
It’s also the start of the Sarenne. Europe’s longest black-graded ski run.
At 16km, it begins on the expansive Glacier de Sarenne before threading its way in a series of steep chutes that flatten into the steep-sided Gorges de Sarenne that separates Alpes d’Huez from Auris-en-Oisans.
It’s not a technical run and, on the right day, it’s bounded by the sort of side-country off-piste that would provide the perfect introduction to powder skiing.
The last time I’d been in this spot, looking at the jaw-dropping view, things had been significantly less tranquil. I’d not been on skis. I’d been on a mountain bike.
It’s the very infamous start straight of the very infamous Mega Avalanche mountain bike race. Taking the first lift before 6am, I’d joined 400 other racers shoulder-toshoulder on a seeded start grid. When the tapes went up it was just about as much carnage as you’d imagine.
This time, things are very different.
I visited Alpe d’Huez in early January when there hadn’t been any snow for nearly two months. It was an odd season. Like many other, particularly French Alpine resorts, the snow came very early and then there was nothing until the middle of January.
Up here though, that’s impossible to tell. The glacier ensures yearround snow cover for around two miles. Even in July for the mountain bike race there’s about 10 minutes of riding on the snow before the slush gives way to the relative sanity of dirt and rocks.
And the fact that there hasn’t been snow for almost 60 days hasn’t stopped the team of pisteurs from making sure the Sarenne was open for business. All 16km of it.
In its current state, like a big white river of snow threading its way in-between the rocks and grass, the run resembles an enormous white fairway on a par 160.
For such a lofty resort, where snow-making would seem to seldom be a necessity through the bulk of the season, the scale of the snow production across the massive lift network is remarkable.
In fact, at the time of our visit, such had been the need to draw on water supplies, there were genuine fears that the huge network of mountain reservoirs would run dry. In the event, such scaremongering proved unfounded as, on cue, while we rolled out of Alpe d’Huez towards Lyon’s St Exupery airport, the snow began to bucket down in huge flakes with a dump that would give the overnight snow makers a few weeks’ rest.
Alpe d’Huez is at the centre of a network of resorts linked by lifts. Arranged like satellites around Alpe D’Huez, the most northern of these is the quiet outpost of Vaujany, then in an anti-clockwise crescent Oz en Oisans, Villard Reculas and then Auris en Oisans is in the south.
The foot of the lift network at Auris is just a few kilometres above the start of the pass that leads to the major French resort of Les Deux Alpes. Indeed, it was announced last year that a much-vaunted €350m plan to link Alpe d’Huez and Les Deux Alpes had received funding and was due to be finished by 2021.
We spent our first night in the small satellite resort of Oz en Oisans. Here a major refurbishment of a faded hotel has produced a gem. The Moontain Hostel is a rare beast. Truly comfortable and entirely reasonably-priced accommodation.
For a solo traveller happy to stay in a dormitory with as many as 11 others, a night can be had from just €23.
As well as the chance to meet other like-minded travellers, the concept hostel can lay on breakfast and dinner in its restaurant and its bar is buzzing even at the start of January.
It’s possible to book private twin rooms with en suite bathrooms for not much more if the idea of a dorm really doesn’t appeal.
Tree-flanked slopes feed down into Oz and a short gondola ride reaches the shoulder between it and the main Alpe d’Huez centre.
Head towards Vaujany and a series of stunning off-piste couloir options reveal themselves. When the snow’s expansive and stable enough, a guide will take clients down these gullies and on itinerary routes further east.
For us though, the barely-covered chutes were clearly impassable and while snow making focuses on the pistes themselves, the off-piste will only be populated by the real thing.
Low temperatures are essential to the success of the snow-making operation.
Too warm and it’s not only hard to make snow but it also doesn’t last. Fortunately for us, the run up to our January trip had been very cold and the ribbons of white were produced by some great quality, cold snow.
Nowhere was the scale of this artificial snow production more evident than from the air. Alpe d’Huez is home to a tiny airport. The short runway is on a significant slope. Pointing into the prevailing wind, tiny planes are sling shot into the air in what feels like a few yards when the conditions are right.
A temperature inversion threatened our sight-seeing flight with cloud filling the valley below the resort and rising and falling dangerously close to the end of the runway.
In the end our pilot received the vital information from a weather station in nearby Bourg-en-Oisans, and decided it was safe to take us on a whistle-stop tour of the Sarenne valley.
Needles to say, floating high above the Gorges de Sarennes and scudding over the clouds was every bit as spectacular as you’d imagine.
Alas, as cloud billowed up over the end of the runway, our man made a hurried landing rather than risk a long detour to find another less fog-bound landing strip.
The Alps are a huge mountain range that presents untold options for skiers in France alone.
Indeed, competition for business between resorts is huge with many jockeying to present themselves as catering for every type of skier - from children in ski creches to off-piste touring ski mountaineers.
But here in the relative south of Alpe d’Huez is a resort that can actually genuinely make the claim. And once it’s connected to Les Deux Alpes, and by extension, the un-pisted kingdom of La Grave, it will truly have it all. 475km of it all.
The others should be afraid.