In March of 2000, I skied at La Grave in France, with my dad and a family friend. For years we had heard rumors of the place, mainly from the occasional articles in Powder magazine that spoke in awed tones of easy lift access to intense backcountry and outrageous steeps. The few links I found on the web only added to the mystique.

I downloaded a map of the area. The first thing you notice is that this is not a normal ski area. The map is little more than a photograph of a giant mountain with one lift drawn on it, a few exclamation points indicating "known dangers" (like 60 meter cliffs), and a couple of yellow arrows indicating where the two major ice falls on one of the glaciers empty into ski area. A closer look at the map reveals that the area offers a vertical drop of 2,100 meters (7,100 feet)! By contrast, Jackson Hole which boasts the largest vertical drop in the U.S. has a measly 4,100'.

Although it hadn't snowed in over a week when we got there, our trip was fantastic. The scenery was unmatched, and the sheer scale of the place was unbelievable. The first day began with a 800m (2,700') 45+ degree couloir, passing immense ice-falls and a refuge (the French Alps sport an extensive hut system where you can stop in to spend the night or to get a hot meal, fresh-cooked French bread and a cold beer in the most amazing mountain settings). The tour continued down a 5 km descent of a long canyon full of ice-falls and huge avalanches, through a few hundred feet of rocks and grass and ended finally in a tiny village. Here we ate delicious fresh-cooked food, drank cold beer and basked in the sun against a yellow stucco wall until a mini-bus took us back to Les Deux Alpes, the ski-area to the southwest of La Grave. Les Deux Alpes connects to La Grave via a ½ km traverse at the top of the mountain. We rode lifts for nearly an hour to get back to the top, crossing a mind-boggling expanse of ski terrain. Despite the fact that Les Deux Alpes sports 58 lifts and 2,000 square acres of skiing and an uphill capacity is 61,000 skiers an hour, our guides seemed to consider it a distinctly lesser ski area full of intermediate-level skiers. Even so, it is 5-6 times the size of almost any American ski-area and had more steep backcountry terrain than any US resort I've been to.