Val d'Isère

Val d'Isère sits at the end of the road, and that is the first thing to love about it. High in the Tarentaise at 1,850 metres, gathered around the baroque church of Saint-Bernard-de-Menthon, whose stone tower has watched the valley since the seventeenth century, the village keeps the gravity of a true mountain community, one that existed long before skiing and will outlast every fashion. The terrain is the most serious in France: the Face de Bellevarde, Olympic and unforgiving; the vast domain shared with Tignes; snow that arrives early and stays late. Skiers speak of Val d'Isère as sailors speak of certain seas, with respect, and a certain longing.

The journey is part of the initiation. From Le Bourget, the jet reaches Chambéry Savoie Mont Blanc in about an hour; the road then follows the A43 to Albertville, the N90 up the Tarentaise to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, and finally the climbing D902, some two hours in all, the valley narrowing, the snowbanks rising, until the village appears in its high bowl of white. The Rolls-Royce Cullinan was, one suspects, designed for exactly this, imperious on the hairpins, silent through the gorge. Inside, the rituals hold: the cabin warm, the throws unfolded, your arrival timed so that the chalet keys and the first fire are already waiting.

Les Barmes de l'Ours waits at the foot of the Face de Bellevarde, all stone, larch and firelight; above the village, Le Refuge de Solaise sits at the top of its own cable car, breakfast served over a sea of cloud. In the old hamlet of Le Fornet, L'Atelier d'Edmond offers starred mountain cooking beside the wood stove. Mornings belong to first lifts and the long, empty runs toward Tignes; afternoons to the pool, or to nothing at all, which the village respects equally. At dusk the bell rings across the snow and the lights come on one by one. Val d'Isère does not entertain its guests. It absorbs them : which is far better.