CHAMONIX, France — Far below the mountain's peak the skier glided down a snow ridge, carving S-curves through the sparkling powder. Tucking into a crouch, he schussed headlong down the slope and onto the flat.
The brisk, early morning ski run was a sensuous plunge through spring sunshine and crisp mountain air into a miles-wide bowl of new-fallen snow.
It was the sort of experience that makes the 81-mile Haute Route, through the western Alps, the best-known, most prestigious high-mountain ski tour in the world.
The Haute Route truly is a "high road," averaging nearly 10,000 feet of altitude as it reaches through Switzerland, France and Italy, linking Europe's two most famous peaks and the pricey resorts of Chamonix and Zermatt.
Mountain huts along the way offer inexpensive lodgings, as well as food and drink flown in by helicopter at prices 10% to 60% above normal.
The costs are heavier in the area of physical exertion, too. An end-to-end journey on the Haute Route demands seven to nine days of strenuous up-and-downhill skiing over powder, ice and every snow condition imaginable.
The challenge discourages--and sometimes endangers--many skiers who have only cross-country or downhill experience.
"Don't underestimate the effort demanded, the technical level," said a spokesman for the Compagnie des Guides in Chamonix. The average distance of the climbs each day, during four or five hours at a normal touring pace, is 3,300 to 4,000 feet.
The Haute Route originally developed as a summer hiking trail more than a century ago.
During the summers of 1860-62 British mountaineers and local guides charted a walking route over the passes between Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, calling it the High Level Route.
Not long after skis were introduced to the Alps late in the 19th Century, mountaineers began trying the Haute Route in winter.
In 1911 a party skied to Zermatt from a village below the Great St. Bernard Pass. Between the world wars other skiers extended the route to its present itinerary: Chamonix to Saas Fee via Zermatt.
Rained out of Chamonix, our party of six skiers and two guides skipped Argentiera and Champex and began at Bourg St. Pierre, where those first skiers had started three-quarters of a century before. Fitting synthetic traction skins to our skis we began a slow, steady climb into the Alps.
All day we toiled higher into the mountains, zigzagging up the steep slopes, and finally stopped for the night in a small mountain hut.
