DAY 2 LA THUILE—LA ROSIÈRE—BOURG-SAINT-MAURICE—LES ARCS—LA PLAGNE—BOZEL Looking back at the day’s journey. A moment to relax after arriving in La Plagne, home for the night. A piste sign in Les Arcs, France. WE WAKE EARLY in a rustic stone apartment to a wet and wild morning, the type of weather that might make even the keenest skier think twice. You rarely get a full week in the Alps without some kind of storm. Therein lies the beauty of this type of adventure—there’s no space for “fair-weather” skiers. So, we don our finest Gore-Tex and prepare to brave it. At the La Thuile ticket window, the wind is howling sideways, far stronger than the 30 mph forecast. “There’s no chance of the link to La Rosière in France opening today,” the woman in the ticket window says. She’s sympathetic, but clearly thinks she’s doing us a favor. We exchange glances: sure, the rain is pouring down here, but it must be snowing up high? We head up to see what all the fuss is about. The gondola delivers us to a long and slow chairlift where sharp snow-flakes pummel us like needles against our skin. We hold a quick team meeting behind a piste sign and decide to head down to the missing chairlift link—worst case we can ski over the Petit Saint Bernard Pass, a summer road which runs down a side valley to La Rosière in France. Anna is a little unsure. “Aaron’s navigated us through more whiteouts than I care to remember,” Rowan pipes up. You can’t spell misadventure without adventure, so we descend into the vast sea of white, using the lift towers to navigate. The wall of headwind spindrift is almost impen-etrable—at times we’re blown off our feet, forced to skate downhill as if gravity decided to take the day off. Stopping to assess our position, the clouds momentarily lift, revealing the closed chairlift that we had hoped to ride. The lights are on in the tiny chalet at the foot of the lift. Someone else must be waiting out the storm. Anna pokes her head inside, and two friendly lift operators immediately invite us inside for a morning limoncello. Inside, we explain our plan. While our new friends clearly think we’re crazy, thankfully they’re equally as interested, and with a few swift Italian remarks, they get straight on the radio to make arrangements for us to con-tinue our journey. Before we know it, two lifts will open just for us, and a snowmobile will take us across the border back into France. Viva l’Italia! Just an hour later, we are descending into calmer envi-rons. In the Alps, weather can come in just as quickly as it can leave, and often all it takes is skiing one valley over for an entirely different climate. We hop on a bus for a short ride down to Bourg-Saint-Maurice and jump on the funicular lift to Les Arcs. Miraculously the sun returns, and we enjoy excellent spring pow; it’s hard to believe that only a few hours ago we were trying to buy lift tickets in the pouring rain. Tucked into a cabin in the forest between La Plagne and Courchevel that night with the wood stove roaring, we toast marshmallows over the fire. 068 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 18, Issue 1: Page 68
