The helicopter dropped over the lip of the mountain and disappeared from
sight. There was a stifled scream from the people watching by the road.
A tense half-minute later, the sound of the rotors became audible again, then
grew in volume until, with a rush, the white chopper came back into view,
rising triumphant over the distant line of peaks. Inside, there were four of
us clinging on with fixed smiles.
Once over the ridge, the pilot, whose name was Mike (in an ideal world all
pilots would be called Mike), threw the little thing back and forth a bit
before landing it — I promise — on the tow-trailer of his van. Then he
backed it into his roomy garage.
Usually, I just take the bus. The helicopter was the idea of Nick, the chalet
manager, who was keen to spare us a 40-minute drive.
It was technically not heliskiing, which I think involves being deposited at
the top of a vertical wall of ice — just a lift to the foot of the chair at
Arc 1950, a village of Disney-like houses.
This was in February, and we were in the valley of the Isère River, but not
staying in Val d’Isère, Tignes or Les Arcs, the well-run but rather
charmless resorts that dominate the skiing at this end of the valley.
Instead, we had found a chalet in a rustic village called Le Miroir.
Chalet Merlo belonged to a hedge-fund manager and was fitted out as you might
expect: outdoor hot tub, bathrooms ensuite, resident chef, gantry of
Bloomberg screens over the bed... No, I think I may have imagined the
screens. But there was permanent champagne as well as heated boot racks, a
visiting masseuse, extensive DVD collection and food better than in any
restaurant.
It was not always like this. Skiing, to begin with, was about pain: the clamp
of boot, the screaming ache of thigh muscle, the frostbitten fingertips in
threadbare, borrowed gloves, the trudge down tarmac roads with skis digging
into your shoulder and the lower back always on the verge of spasm.
Learning is hard enough, but trying to learn in cut-price resorts with a
half-hour walk to the lift and then little more than ice and rock at the top
was a test of one’s desire. Macugnaga, Sauze d’Oulx, Le Mont d’Or... These
are not so much notches scored into the 1970s headboard as war wounds that
on bad days can still fester.
Yet at some point it must have started to become enjoyable. We found lodgings
nearer to the lifts; we could afford to go to resorts that actually had
snow. The design of the boots became better. And finally, at some point, we
got the hang of the sport itself. Through the 1980s a regular group of us
tried different places: Cortina, Zermatt, Les Houches, St Anton, Arabba, Val
d’Isère, Megève...
All had their charms and their drawbacks. For what it’s worth, I thought
Zermatt was, all in all, the best, though the apartment I had booked was so
dingy that two of our number checked out on day two.
Arabba had a knotty Italo-Austrian character and probably my favourite single
run — the Marmolada: several minutes of gently twisting pleasure. The
drawback was that it needed two vertiginous cable cars to reach the 11,000ft
summit, and in the second of these some sort of decompressive altitude
effect invariably caused the less inhibited passengers to break wind.
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