All alone in the world’s biggest ski resort

La Plagne is the world’s biggest ski resort but — for a sport that depends on gradient — has possibly the worst name. Plagne means “flat”.

Apparently when the farmers of old looked across from the far side of the Tarentaise Valley to the high pastures where the pistes are now, it looked flat, a sort of plateau — a “plagne” in the regional dialect. “I think it’s why it got this reputation as a family-friendly destination, somewhere easy, that was good for beginners,” Anne Tellier, the resort’s press officer, told me over dinner shortly after I arrived in town last week. That reputation has clearly been beneficial: though it was only founded in 1961, for three decades the resort kept growing, sprouting seven purpose-built villages on the mountainside above the four older hamlets below.

Before dinner I’d visited the most striking of them, Aime 2000, opened in 1969 and known in France as the “Paquebot des Neiges”, the “Ocean liner of the snows”. A long brutalist block with three peaks (imagine a Toblerone writ large in concrete) and an internal shopping mall, it is utterly functional, the definition of a “ski factory”.

Later we would see the 10-storey blocks of Plagne Bellecôte, completed in 1974 and resembling a hydroelectric dam, stretching incongruously across a pretty wooded valley. Little wonder that, despite La Plagne’s claim to being the world’s largest resort (with 56,622 tourist beds), you’ll probably more frequently hear it referred to as the world’s ugliest.

And so, in 35 years of exploring the Alps, I’d always avoided it — mainstream, industrial-scale skiing being pretty much the opposite of what I was seeking. Yet there were also rumours of another side to the area, a suggestion that hiding behind its family-friendly image was an abundance of off-piste skiing, cherished by locals and little exploited by, or advertised to, outsiders.

This winter a new, €26mn cable car could bring that lesser-known side of La Plagne into much clearer focus. It whisks skiers and pedestrians straight to a new café that teeters on a high ridge of a mountain called the Bellecôte, beyond which the shadowy north face plunges for a vertical mile. Covered with couloirs and powder fields, the routes down it range from the extreme to the merely hardcore. Though often strafed by avalanches, few other faces in the Alps are so perfectly shaped for freeriding — and now anyone will be able to get a grandstand view.

There was just one problem, explained Anne that first night to the group of journalists who had come to see it: the new cable car wasn’t quite finished and would be closed for the duration of our stay. It’s due to start full service this weekend.

In the morning we set off to explore anyway, led by two guides from the Ecole du Ski Français, Thierry Delecluse and Gilles Olivier. If La Plagne has a lot of beds, it was quickly clear it has more than enough terrain to match, and that this is heaven for a distance-hungry intermediate skier.

I was even more impressed by the views. To the north, beyond a valley filled with a sea of clouds, rose the sparkling bulk of Mont Blanc. To the south, we looked across to the slopes of Courchevel, with Méribel and Val Thorens behind. To the east was the Grand Motte, high point of Val d’Isère and Tignes’ combined ski area, a reminder that this Tarentaise region has a greater concentration of lifts and pistes than anywhere else in the world.

Val d’Isère led the way, getting its first drag lift in 1936, followed by Méribel in 1938 and Courchevel, boosted by public funding, in 1946. While they developed as tourist destinations, the four small communities around what is now La Plagne remained poor relations, dependent on a mine that produced lead and silver. Silicosis and lead poisoning were common; the local doctor, Pierre Borrione called the mine “a hell”.

Borrione was something of a local hero, a resistance fighter during the second world war who had hidden in the mountain pastures and treated patients secretly at night. In the late 1950s, when it was clear the mine’s days were numbered, undercut by imports and with productivity declining, Borrione used his popularity to unite the traditionally fractious communities and establish a “Committee for the Defense of Economic Interests” dedicated to fighting the area’s depopulation.

It adopted a plan to create a ski resort and in 1960, Émile Allais, France’s former world champion, was brought in to help design the slopes. The potential was clear: at 1,970 metres, La Plagne was higher even than Val d’Isère, and by 1963 Air Alpes was running small ski-equipped planes to bring visitors from Courchevel to try out the new resort.

Our second day proved more of a revelation, proof of how easy it is to escape others in this huge domain. We rode the lifts to the Roche de Mio at 2,739 metres, then followed Thierry away from the pistes on to the wide, open slopes of the Combe de La Vélière. Clouds swirled on the peaks in front of us, in the distance we could see Courchevel’s cluster of five-star hotels, but here we were totally alone, the valley smothered in silence and deep, untracked snow.

We kept descending, eventually swapping the powder fields for a narrow path that wound though a band of cliffs. Suddenly Thierry pointed — just off the path was a big male ibex, its curving horns almost a metre long. Soon we saw another, then a herd crowding around a small half-frozen stream, the animals so numerous we gave up counting.

At last we side-slipped and snow-ploughed down to the flat valley floor and the village of Champagny-le-Haut, its chalets clustered about a tall church spire. It’s a dead end, the valley blocked by the bulk of the Grand Motte, and it felt like we were the only people moving for miles around. From there it was a short taxi ride down to Champagny-en-Vanoise where, after a long lunch of fresh pasta on the sunny terrace of the restaurant Alpina, we caught the lift back up towards home.

It’s easy to see how, in the early 1960s, the idea of La Plagne must have seemed like a brave vote for the future — swapping ill health, long hours underground, depopulation and economic decline for the sunlit uplands of winter tourism. Little surprise that the resulting architecture was so bold, an imposition of modernity on the mountain landscape. In the 1970s the resort launched summer skiing on two glaciers on the south side of the Bellecôte under the slogan “winter sports no longer need winter”.

The mood is less boisterous now, and amid a raft of sustainability measures the lift operating company has committed to not extend the ski area further. Both glaciers have now shrunk so much that summer skiing is impossible and melting permafrost has forced the removal of the two highest lifts. The impetus for the new cable car was to replace those and reduce the amount of infrastructure on the mountain, rather than to deliberately provide a fast-track to the Bellecôte’s north face.

On our final day I went to see it. I rented touring skis and climbed up the deserted piste to the new summit station, the cabins of the gondola dangling stationary above me. After a bit more than an hour, I reached the top, 3,080 metres above sea level, where I stood alone among the outdoor tables and peered through the windows at the café, Le Sixième Ciel, wishing I could go in to try the “menu grande faim”. A few paces away, I looked across at the yawning north face, almost 1,900m from top to bottom and some 6km wide.

I met up with Thierry and the rest of the group slightly lower and we tipped forward on to the face. It is a vertical maze, ribs of rock dividing the numerous gullies and spurs. Some locals privately voice fears that the new café and lift will tempt unprepared skiers to venture here, but the gradient will surely deter most and convince the rest of the need for a guide. Thierry led us on a more benign route, skirting the steepest sections and debris from earlier avalanches, but it was a thrill to be there, tiny on the vast face.

Finally we descended an old hunter’s path on to the valley floor, passed a long tree-lined avenue that led to the Palais de la Mine, the former mine headquarters, and stopped at a tiny bar, the Fer à Cheval, two horses breathing clouds of steam in the paddock outside. We toasted our descent with hot chocolates topped by great peaks of whipped cream, wondering that a run so long and so lonely was possible in the midst of the world’s biggest resort.

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