Spring awakens in Westchester County, New York, with vibrant blooms and outdoor adventures. It’s a perfect time of year to escape the city bustle for a refreshing day trip and explore parks, gardens, and scenic landscapes.
Piste off! Skiers fear new lift will threaten La Grave’s old school charm
05.03.2024 - 08:17 / theguardian.com
There’s nothing like scrambling along a jagged granite ridge resplendent in russet and lime-green lichen, when it should be covered in snow, to remind you that the climate crisis is in full swing. My guide, Maxant Danilo, and I are at an altitude of more than 2,500 metres in the Hautes-Alpes, but even though it’s late January, conditions on south-facing slopes such as these feel more like late spring. Our snowboards are strapped to our backpacks instead of our feet.
Danilo, who works for a guide collective based in nearby La Grave, tells me the resort actually had one of the strongest starts to a winter season in recent years, with plenty of snow and low temperatures from November until the middle of January. The problem is, the constant mild weather since has melted much of the snowpack.
Yet he’s not too worried. “You can always find snow to go touring around La Grave, however unpredictable the conditions,” he says. And to be fair, aside from that rocky traverse on the ridge, we have. Using splitboards – snowboards that split into two to act as touring skis so you can hike uphill – we’ve climbed about 750 metres this morning, mostly on soft snow, with the odd patch of ice, for which we had to attach crampons to our splitboards.
The route, called the Col de Côte Plaine, is relatively gentle, making it a great introduction to touring for competent skiers or snowboarders. Danilo says he often brings first-timers here. From the swooping valley we ascend to our picnic spot at the top, where we sit facing the Écrins massif and dramatic La Meije mountain. The views are extraordinary, with nothing but nature visible to the eye, bar the odd solar-powered weather station.
The only people we encounter are a group of excitable ski instructors planning to ride down a steep couloir on their day off. After a leisurely lunch in the sunshine, the snowboard run down is a lot of fun. We keep going as long as we can, dodging patches of grass until the thawed terrain takes over and we have to walk the last stretch to the road, where Danilo hitchhikes back to collect his car from where we left it in the morning.
If we’d had binoculars at our lunch spot, to the right of La Meije we might have glimpsed La Grave’s cable car, a Pantone swatch of sunny orange, yellow, and red, which Danilo and I board the next morning. I’m nervous, even though I’ve been snowboarding for 20 years, because La Grave has a formidable reputation as a hardcore ski resort. Except it isn’t really a ski resort in that it has no pistes, maintained trails or safety markers, beyond a raggedy orange flag that is meant to warn there are cliffs below.
But Danilo assures me that La Grave – which at 3,550 metres offers some of the highest lift-accessed terrain
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