Mark was beginning to shiver violently and seemed to have forgotten how to put on his skis. Our spirits were flagging. It was at least 12 hours since we’d set off and more than an hour since we’d watched the sun fall behind the neighbouring peaks, leaving our little group alone in the freezing darkness, 10,000ft up on a glacier.
On all sides, a desolate sea of snow and ice stretched away far beyond the reach of our puny torches. I knelt down to help Mark with his binding. ‘If this goes on for another half an hour,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll just lie down in the snow and die.’ It was only day one.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised – we’d all come in search of a ski holiday that was a bit different. For, as spoilt as it might seem, as the years pass, the charms of the conventional ski trip can begin to pall. You start to resent the crowds on the pistes and the queues in the overpriced self-service restaurants. The après-ski hilarity and dancing in ski boots to Bon Jovi can begin to feel forced. As more people ski off-piste, the rush to get to the fresh powder before everyone else becomes ever more stressful. And the more the mountains become covered in super-fast, super-wide chairlifts, with heated seats and advertisments on every pylon, the less like wilderness and more like high-altitude suburbia they feel.
Little wonder that growing numbers of skiers are choosing to leave the resorts behind altogether and go ski touring. Sticky ‘skins’ attached to the base of the skis allow tourers to climb up the mountain without the need for ski lifts, freeing them to head beyond the crowds, cafés and machinery, out into the pristine mountain wilderness where the powder lies untouched. Ski schools and guides across the Alps are reporting a surge in demand for ski touring trips, starting with half-day forays just beyond the pistes, then building up to multi-day mini expeditions staying in mountain huts along the way. And almost from the moment you take your first steps on touring skis, you begin to hear talk of the legendary Haute Route, the world’s most famous ski tour.
First skied in 1911, the route was originally devised by the gentlemen climbers of the British Alpine Club, and connects two of the world’s most celebrated mountain resorts, Chamonix in France and Zermatt in Switzerland. You begin under the shadow of western Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc, and end, usually after six days and 80 miles of skiing, under the gaze of the Matterhorn, perhaps the world’s most photographed peak.
Today it sits alongside the trek to Everest Base Camp and the climb of Kilimanjaro in the premier league of adventure experiences, ones which people travel across the globe to ‘bag’, assisted by hundreds of tour operators, agents and guides. Our group is typically international – the six of us live in four different countries and include a cattle farmer from Australia, an airline pilot from Hong Kong and a banker from Ireland.
We meet for a welcome drink in the bar of the friendly Hotel de l’Arve in Chamonix, engaging in small talk but really trying to surreptitiously gauge each other’s level of fitness and experience. Will I be left behind, I wonder, as I munch on the peanuts? Will they laugh when I put on my harness upside down?
