On a partly cloudy afternoon in August 2019, I followed a Spanish mountain guide named Simón Elías up steep granite terraces on the north face of a peak in the French portion of the Mont Blanc massif. The 12,561-foot summit of the mountain, called , loomed 1,000 feet above where we were climbing, and 2,000 feet below us lay the Argentière glacier, its surface striated with crevasses. We had entered the Argentière basin across a low point in the ridgeline called the Col des Cristaux—which in English translates to Crystal Pass—before traversing laterally across the mountainside. On another rope, photographer Nicolas Blandin moved alongside a 66-year-old named Christophe Péray.

The topography was complicated: fresh snow stuck to the mountainside, and I periodically lost sight of ElĂ­as ahead of me as he moved behind rocks. Communication with Blandin and PĂ©ray was only possible through echoing shouts.

I belayed Elías as he put in a cam before positioning himself on the face to uncover a four. Four is French for oven, but in this context, the word refers to cavities in the mountainside that, in the broadest sense, resemble somewhere you could bake bread. English has various equivalent geological terms: alpine-type fissure, alpine cleft, or, most simply, pocket. This one was on a snow-covered ledge, a couple feet wide at its broadest. Unless you were an expert, however, it would be hard to distinguish the site from any of 1,000 other such ledges on the face.

I shouted up, asking if the pocket was large. “No, it’s not enormous,” Elías’s voice echoed down in French. “But there are beautiful pieces here. Very beautiful pieces.”

This area contained several similar pockets, which ElĂ­as and PĂ©ray had discovered a few weeks earlier by rappelling down from the ridge above. It was, until recently, permanently covered by ice and snow, but that had melted out, likely due to climate change.

I scrambled up and joined Elías on the ledge. Some minutes later, Blandin and Péray also appeared at the site. The Spaniard sang a wordless melody as he drove in pitons and secured us to the rock face.

Now he and Péray began to clear the snow from the ledge and reach into the cavity. The opening expanded as they dug until it was roughly wide enough to fit a soccer ball. Their tools included a chisel and a green plastic rake that Péray had appropriated from his children’s sandcastle equipment. They also prepared with blowtorches to melt the remaining ice, the gas hissing in the thin, high-altitude air. “At the moment, the snow prevents me from seeing properly,” Péray said in French. “After clearing the snow and removing some stones, I should reach them very soon.”

We were high, north-facing, and out of the sun. I waited in the cold until eventually Elías, crouched on his knees, began to pull out chunks of a dark glassy substance. A few smaller pieces came first, which he held together in his orange-and-gray-gloved hand like oversized, irregular marbles. The block that followed was much larger, the size of a small brick, its surfaces angled together into a sharp point, like a microcosm of the spiky mountains all around us. It was translucent. This was what we had come for.

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For the closing test on ice day, the women went last.

The setting was a streaked, bulbous frozen face on the fractured lower section of the Glacier du Tour, the northernmost ice sheet in the French portion of the Mont Blanc massif. The Swiss border started at the flanking ridgeline, above the newly renovated Albert Premier Hut. The altitude was around 8,400 feet, a little lower than the peaks of the Aiguilles Rouge, mostly snow-free now in July. A line of anchors and cord ran some 50 feet up the ice.

The test was straightforward enough. Using two leashless axes, candidates would have to climb the 50 feet of vertical ice, then traverse horizontally for another 20 feet, then descend. Time limit: six minutes.

It was around noon, and below the east-facing ice wall the shadow was narrow; it covered some people belaying the climbers but little else. Farther back, in blue quilted jackets supplied by the Japanese apparel firm Onyone to the —France’s National School for Skiing and Mountaineering, ENSA for short—stood judges who would assess performance. Other instructors, including a doctor and a nurse, lolled on a higher ice crest in the sun.

Roughly 60 men had already been through this test. Now it was the turn of four women. Among them was Mélanie Martinot, the 32-year-old daughter of a ski instructor and ski patroller, who worked as the manager of the Refuge de l’Olan, a mountain hut at 7,690 feet in the Écrins Massif to the south.

Another was Valentine Fabre, a 42-year-old woman, originally from Paris, who had tried and failed to pass this test three times since 2015. “I’ve been twice to the World Cup for ski mountaineering,” said Fabre, a doctor who works for the French military. “But the only qualification that lets you teach ski mountaineering, if you want to take clients on glaciers, is to be a mountain guide.”

Hulya Vassail, 28, also worked in a mountain hut, though a much closer one: the Albert Premier, perched on the rocks above this very glacier. “It’s a project I’ve had for a long time,” she said, simply, of her desire to become a guide, a profession in which women are vastly outnumbered by men.

Finally there was Aurélia Lanoë, a 30-year-old who lived a “paradisiacal” nomadic existence in a converted ambulance as an accompagnatrice en moyenne montagne, a lower level of qualification than mountain guide, which meant she could take hikers out in summer and snowshoers in winter, but not use ropes or other technical alpine equipment with clients.

“It’s certain we’re in a minority,” she said of the female candidates. “But while the older generation of guides were different, with the new generation it’s rare to find machismo, and many are very open.”

“Physiologically, though,” she said of herself and the other women, “we are not the same.” Physical differences aside, the question for everybody here was this: Can I find the strength and skill to get through?

The École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpin­isme’s entrance test, Le Probatoire, translates as “the probationary exam,” and the name correctly hints that mountain guiding in Europe is a different trade than in the United States, where guiding concessions are generally given by park authorities to companies who then train their own apprentices. U.S. guiding is becoming more regulated, but the system is still much less formal than in Europe.

The activities of European guides range from basic école de glace—ice school, taking groups for their first steps on glaciers in crampons—to leading people up some of the most famous (and difficult) terrain in the Alps, such as the north face of the Eiger. Much of guiding work concentrates on common bucket-list objectives—climbing Mont Blanc, or skiing the famous Vallée Blanche off-piste descent in Chamonix. But you can hire a guide for anything, and some also work on longer-term gigs with overseas expeditions. Rates in France run between $300 and $525 per guide per day.

The job has its origins in the early stages of alpinism, in the 19th century, when gentlemen climbers—often British—would engage local French, Italian, or Swiss farmers to take them to the peaks. Through the decades, the good and bad parts of seeking assistance in these mountains have persisted. The situation is pithily summarized by a raunchy joke told by one of the doctors based at ENSA. Question: What do a guide and a condom have in common? Answer: It’s better without, but it’s safer with.

To legally take clients out in the four major Alpine countries—France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria—a guide has to earn qualification from the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations. The process is specialized, an investment of time comparable to obtaining a Ph.D. But while the IFMGA ticket is international and theoretically the same level regardless of where it’s obtained, the routes to it are national and reflect national proclivities.

In Switzerland, for example, the training rotates among the three cantons—substates of the country—that have mountainous terrain: Valais, Berne, and Grisons. It costs roughly $30,000, significantly more than what you’d pay in Italy or France. 

In France, the process is centralized, and a single institution—Chamonix-based ENSA, which was founded in 1945—trains every guide. It’s relatively swift: you can qualify in just over three years, and there are opportunities to work as an “aspirant” guide before that. The entire program costs under $10,000, with a state subsidy available that covers some of the fees.

These attractive factors, combined with a mountain culture in which the profession of guide is extremely prestigious, means that ENSA gets many applications, between 125 and 160 annually. ENSA insists the selection process is an exam—with anyone who reaches the required standard gaining acceptance—rather than a competition. In reality, ENSA usually advances only 30 to 50 candidates per year.

To this end, ENSA runs the Probatoire, a brutal winnowing exercise that’s comparable to special-forces selection in the military. Once the initial attrition is complete, few candidates are cut further on, which is a typically French approach: you survive a tough exam and it effectively gives you lifetime entrance to a rarefied club. Pass the Probatoire and you enter the elite corps of guides. Pass the entrance test for the École Nationale d’Administration, the institution that educated four recent French presidents, including Emmanuel Macron, and you get to run France. This is the Gallic way. 

The real question with these French methods is whether they produce good results. The Grandes Écoles system dates from the late 18th century, and the institutions created then were meant to democratize France’s civil service and wider society. They’re now viewed as having done the opposite, creating an enclave for the social elite. Macron, under pressure from the yellow-vest protest movement, has promised to close ENA, the institution that made him. Meanwhile, in the Alps, the jury is still out on whether the French training system, for all its attendant prestige, actually produces better and safer mountain leaders. 

In late March of this year, a collection of young athletes gathered in the ENSA lobby in Chamonix. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, clearly visible six miles to the south and more than 12,000 feet above town, rose the domed, glaciated head of 15,777-foot Mont Blanc, western Europe’s highest peak. The ENSA compound, with its aging modernist design, inspires near religious devotion as a temple of French alpinism. Written on concrete towers that flank the main block, in blood-red capital letters, are ANNAPURNA and MAKALU, the two 8,000-meter Himalayan peaks climbed first by the French, in 1950 and 1955, respectively.

There was red wine on tap in the cafeteria and classrooms named for Les Drus, La Verte, and other famous Alpine peaks. Upstairs there was a library full of guidebooks and mountaineering periodicals, and a small museum that included the chunky gaiter boots that Franco-Italian alpinist Walter Cecchinel wore on one of his pioneering winter climbs in the seventies. Elsewhere there was a lab where ropes and other equipment could be tested to the point of destruction.

The wider environs of Chamonix reflect the elevated social position of mountain guides in France—there are car parks and roundabouts named after Louis Lachenal and Lionel Terray, two local guides involved in the Annapurna and Makalu heroics. There’s a famous statue of Jacques Balmat and Horace Bénédict de Saussure, climbing pioneers who summitted Mont Blanc in the late 1700s.

The  was formed in 1821—making it one of the first organizations of mountain professionals in the world—and many of the same old families are still represented in today’s ENSA programs: Ravanel, Simond, Balmat, Payot. ENSA graduates can expect to earn a low salary, and it’s recommended that they have a backup job in case of injury. But as Caroline George, a guide who trained in both Switzerland and the U.S., points out: “Guiding is a very highly respected profession in the Alps, much like to the standard of being a lawyer or a doctor, and it’s maybe more highly regarded here.”

Pete Mason, an American who passed the Probatoire in 2005, says that growing up, he regarded mountain guides as glorified Boy Scout leaders. After he moved to France, he saw that becoming a guide was something you attempted only if you were a first-class alpinist. “Here it felt more like if you’re into the outdoors and you have a certain level, that’s where the natural progression is.”

The ENSA candidates stood or sat in armchairs, wearing trail shoes and down coats and vests. To get to this stage, they had to have already completed 39 alpine routes within three years, including various technical challenges and ski-mountaineering routes. This requirement used to be even harder: 55 routes were required, and candidates were expected to have done a number of grandes courses, like the north faces of the Eiger and the Grandes Jorasses. The change was designed to reduce the number of hopefuls getting hurt or killed.

Most of the candidates came from mountainous regions—Chamonix, obviously, but also Grenoble and the Haute-Maurienne. But there were exceptions. Leo Pfitzner, a 27-year-old, hailed from Orléans, on the Loire River in north-central France, well away from any peaks. He started climbing with a local chapter of the French Alpine Club, and his logbook, which he brought to Chamonix, showed his progression. The long descriptions of early climbs—“Start of August 2007, Punta Gniffetti, on Monte Rosa, 4,554m, with a guide 60 years old”—give way to more staccato prose as he gains experience. In photos, a teenager fills out into a confident young man.

There were also a handful of non-French candidates, from Spain, the Netherlands, and Argentina. Other outsiders have gone through in the past, too, including a number of Brits. The ENSA teaching staff included Neil Brodie, a 52-year-old Scot who, after living in France for 28 years, spoke English with an odd Franco-Scottish accent, and Zoe Hart, an American guide who completed her training in the U.S.

The average age of the candidates was 28, but the spread was considerable. The class included Thomas Krommenacker, a 39-year-old former investment banker from Switzerland who got burned out on spreadsheets in London. Among the younger candidates was Baptiste Obino, a 20-year-old French gendarme—police officer—who was sleeping in his car. All in all, there were 126 people at this stage, six of them women.

The candidates were aiming to enter a very dangerous profession. Upstairs at ENSA, there’s a memorial to the teaching staff killed since 1945—with 29 names on it, the most recent in 2016. Between 1995 and 2018, a total of 121 French guides died in mountaineering accidents; the worst individual years were 2005 with 11 deaths, and 2009 with ten.

During the 2019 Probatoire, several of the candidates were already well acquainted with risk in the Alps. The contingent included a young man whose girlfriend had been killed in front of him in a ski-­mountaineering accident just weeks before the winter test began. Valentine Fabre’s husband died in August 2012, when a rope broke on the Arête des Papillons ridge above Chamonix. Lucien Boucansaud, a blond 23-year-old who at first remained tight-lipped about his family, later explained that in March 2014, his father, a Chamonix guide, was also killed. For good reason, U.S. alpinist Mark Twight once wrote that Chamonix is “the death sport capital of the world.”

The atmosphere on the first day, beneath a surface bonhomie, was tense. There’s a traditional element of interrogation to assess if candidates have really done the routes they claim; outright lying is rare but not unknown, exaggeration more common. There’s also a new element, a “personal project” in which candidates have to explain their motivation. I was allowed to watch one of these sessions on the condition that I not use the names of the candidates.

Two ENSA instructors, Michel “Tchouky” Fauquet, an older man, and Mathieu Détrie, a younger guide, probed an eager young man before them, another gendarme.

“I was born in Chamonix,” he said. “My motivation is professional—ENSA has unique expertise. There’s a quality here. I want to gain specialisms that I can’t gain with the gendarmes.”

After the preliminaries, individuals were grilled for details. “It’s the first filter for entry into the training,” Fauquet told me afterward. “We are looking for people who have experience in the mountains. We can’t train them from zero­­—there’s a required level that’s needed. We look to verify that they are there.”

That evening there was a briefing in a lecture space inside the ENSA complex, run by François Marsigny, head of the alpine department and the animating spirit of this place. Tall and laconic, intimidating, and famously difficult to talk to, Marsigny has run the Probatoire since 2016; before that, he was one of the leading French alpinists of his generation. He was born in Paris and trained as an architect, but he’d been coming to the Alps for years to climb. Weary of office life, he qualified as a guide in 1989, when he was 29.

In the early 1990s, when Mark Twight blazed a number of savage new routes above Chamonix—notably There Goes the Neighborhood and Beyond Good and Evil—he was, in essence, daring the local French climbing establishment to match what he’d done. It was Marsigny who first repeated these lines. In 1995, he won the Piolet d’Or, alpinism’s greatest prize, for a new line on Cerro Torre in Patagonia, done with Briton Andy Parkin. In 2007, he and his wife climbed 26,906-foot Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest peak on the planet, without supplemental oxygen.

Now Marsigny stood under posters showing a climber leaping over a crevasse and a tent dug into a snow hole. “Right,” he said brusquely. “We’ll start with the presentation of the tests for tomorrow.”

In a pattern that was repeated, details about the next day’s challenge were only revealed the night before, so that candidates couldn’t go out and do recon. On a large screen, images for the ski test were displayed. The site would be Les Grands Montets, above Argentière, some five miles north up the valley.

“This is a state exam just like the bac,” the slides warned, referring to the standardized test that French high school students take. “Respect the rules, the timings, the documents.”

The candidates would have to make a ski-mountaineering ascent of 4,757 feet in two hours 25 minutes. Packs had to contain full avalanche-safety kit—probe, shovel, and transceiver—and had to weigh at least 15.4 pounds for men and 11 pounds for women. Anyone who didn’t match or beat the required time was out. Two off-piste ski descents would follow, using lifts to go back up after the first.

In a series of workshops, candidates would be assessed on their technical skiing skill. That element was marked on a scale. Here, too, there was an automatic elimination element. Anyone who fell more than once during the ski descents would immediately be sent home.

The next morning, March 19, dawned clear and cold, the sun reddening the granite faces of the Drus above the Mer de Glace glacier. The night before, Obino, the 20-year-old who was sleeping in his car, had cooked a meal of couscous. He left some out, hoping to eat it in the morning. But by then it had frozen hard. He would do the ski climb, dizzy from hunger, on a breakfast bar.

In Argentière, up the valley, a spring balance hung beneath a tree. The ENSA staff weighed the candidates’ packs. Most, despite the cold, had stripped down to light fleeces under the numbered white bibs used to identify them; some wore headphones. A line of red plastic pegs with the blue and white ENSA logo marked the course they would take: up a piste and into the woods, on steep ground. The trail was narrow, and the candidates departed in pairs at timed intervals.

The instructors took the gondola. Higher up, the ascent path crossed the groomed ski area, and the candidates zigzagged up the ground below the lifts. The instructors made their way to the top using a chairlift and skis, completing a skin ascent across to a shoulder at 8,600 feet. There they waited for the first arrivals in a cold, isolated world very different from the valley below.

The first candidates arrived in under two hours, and Hulya Vassail clocked in at a strong 2:15. Although the time limits were stiff, only a few failed to make it, but a handful dropped out during the ascent.

For the descent, the candidates formed into small groups, each with two instructors. I went down with Tchouky, who I’d sat with during the interrogation the previous afternoon. We cut a traverse line down skier’s left and entered an open powder field.

“Over there, there are rocks,” Tchouky said when he briefed the group. “You go in front of us, onto the sunny hill, then into the couloir.”

The snow was initially forgiving, and the candidates were capable, but not all were top-notch skiers. One person in my group broke a ski or binding—it was unclear which. He frantically asked to borrow mine, but my setup wouldn’t have fit him. He limped off on one ski, eliminated.

The instructors descended first, to be in place as the candidates did their terrain tests. The easier higher slopes gave way below the timberline to defiles lined with tree roots and narrow ravines. The second line, after a swift traverse across the pistes, went down a tall mogul field under a crag, followed by more difficult passages through trees.

Eventually, it was over. “Breathe, relax,” said Christophe Jacquemoud, the guide who had organized the test, as he stood on a snow-covered hump among the brush. “Go back to the piste, descend to the bottom.”

That evening, in a ritual that would be repeated throughout the Probatoire, Marsigny walked wordlessly from his office and pinned up a list of names in the ENSA lobby: 75 who would move on to the next stage. After just two days, the Probatoire’s attrition rate was more than 40 percent.

Before the results were announced, Lu­cien Boucansaud had been confident. “It was super,” he replied when I asked how his day had gone. “We had relatively cold conditions. The snow was good. I think it went OK.” He was right: he got through. Thomas Krommenacker also made it, as did Hulya Vassail and Baptiste Obino. Leo Pfitzner, the boy from Orléans with the elaborate journal, was eliminated.

Whether all these theatrics produce good mountain guides is a complex question. It’s hard to compare France’s fatality numbers to other countries, because there are no uniform statistics. In France, any accident that involves injury or damage to equipment has to be logged, but reporting rules are different elsewhere. Still, it’s widely believed, and largely accepted by the French climbing establishment, that French guides have historically suffered more accidents than guides in other alpine countries.

Some attribute this to the complex terrain of the Mont Blanc massif. Christian Tromms­dorff, a French guide who serves on the international committee of the IFMGA, suggests that the heavily glaciated western Alps present more problems and hazards than, say, the Italian Dolomites.

“The Dolomites are dry, there’s no mixed climbing. It’s rock, it’s quite solid,” he told me. “The level of risk in a hundred days of mountaineering in the Dolomites is fundamentally different from a hundred days here.”

Zoe Hart, the American who teaches at ENSA, also pointed to the local terrain.

“The accidents in French mountain guiding are more elevated, but it’s impossible to compare,” she said. “Imagine you’re a guide in Yosemite, you’re working on a rock climb that’s granite, that’s solid rock, every day. And imagine you’re a guide in Chamonix, and you’re taking a lift to high altitude, to ski on the glacier, in climate change.”

Others aren’t sure about the terrain explanation, pointing out that arguably, the ­Italian side of Mont Blanc is more topographically complicated than the French side, and yet Italian guides still don’t have the same accident rate as the French. In this analysis, the difference stems from the testosterone-laced French guiding approach, not the slopes above Chamonix.

In my home country, the UK, British climbers often complain about the behavior of French mountain guides. A perusal of online forums reveals many specific beefs, from a French guide “front-pointing up my rucksack” to guides removing slower climbers’ protection so they can move faster.

It isn’t easy to untangle such anecdotes, especially since the British and French have always been rivals. The French counter that we Brits think we’re still in Scotland, where you need lots of extra clothing, and we’re unable to understand that in the Alps, with the objective dangers of rock and serac fall, there’s safety in speed and merit in placing less protection.

However, the notion that French mountain guides take more risks is accepted closer to France, too. Mario Ravello, an Italian guide based in Morgex—on the Italian side of the Mont Blanc massif—describes French guides visiting his region with parties of ski tourers, shooting past at high speeds on avalanche-prone terrain that the Italians ski more conservatively. François Marsigny says that such perceptions about French guides are accurate in some cases but not all, calling them “succinct generalities.” He adds that the French are often more willing than their foreign counterparts to take clients on major routes, such as the north face of the Eiger.

It’s difficult to avoid linking these takes with the way France selects guides. The overwhelming number of applications means that a cut has to happen, yet the way the Probatoire is structured obviously favors tough young athletes. But for the brief and recently introduced statement of purpose at the start, there’s no acknowledgement that candidates are looking to enter a client-facing profession.

The combination of a storied past and a tough entrance exam makes change hard to implement. The official history of the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, a hardbound volume with lavish pictures, is clearly intended as a hagiography, with gushing portraits of guides ancient and modern. But reading between the lines reveals a conservative profession that has, in its time, initially opposed almost every new development in two centuries of alpinism, from attempting any but the easiest summit routes to the admission of non–valley natives and women to the ranks of guides.

In recent years, however, some change has been forced on the French guiding community, and the impetus has been death. Among the 62 guides killed in the aughts was Karine Ruby, a native of the Chamonix Valley who won a silver medal in snowboarding at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. She subsequently trained as a guide, and in 2009, still an aspirant, she died, falling into a crevasse on the Glacier du GĂ©ant in the Mont Blanc massif. One of the two climbers roped to her was also killed. Nine other guides died in accidents that year.

In 2011–12, ENSA halted the entire guide-training program for a year to reformulate its syllabus. A new course emerged, with updated modules covering psychological stress and client management and, the administration claims, less focus on sheer alpine performance as the sole measure of guiding competence.

But beyond the addition of the personal statement at the beginning, there was no alteration to the Probatoire. While it’s possible to wash out during the training itself, nowhere near as many do as at the start—therefore, who becomes a French guide is still largely determined on the same narrow grounds of technical proficiency and performance. While the large number of French guides getting killed did lead to a reassessment of how they’re trained, selection of the raw material remains the same. And that funnel rewards aggressive young athletes, not careful client managers.

Four months after the Probatoire’s winter phase, 75 remaining candidates crowded onto a little red train that winds up and down the Chamonix Valley. It was a different world now, the first day of July, with the snow gone, the meadows green, and tourists ambling around town in shorts and sunglasses. The candidates wore a riot of brightly colored French outdoor apparel and trail shoes. 

The first exercise of the summer Probatoire, an orienteering test, was put together by Elodie Le Comte, one of a handful of women on the school’s staff. Twenty-two orange checkpoints were scattered in a zone of the valley around the Chalets de Charousse, close to the village of Les Houches, about five miles from Chamonix. Each candidate was given one of five separate maps marked with a course of six checkpoints.

“It’s different for everyone,” Le Comte explained. “They have to find all the checkpoints in one hour and 30 minutes—if they miss one, or exceed the time limit, they are eliminated.” The route covered 3.42 miles and 909 feet of ascent. Permitted equipment included compass, map, and altimeter. No GPS.

At the starting line, François Marsigny stood in a baggy blue shirt and shorts, an outfit that looked incongruous on his spare frame, like a tutu on a scarecrow.

Once again, the candidates set off in a staggered fashion and were soon spread out. The checkpoints were sited clearly, at road junctions or other obvious map points. You were not expected to cut through bush to find them. Here, too, as with the climb during the ski test, attrition was designed to be limited.

“I found it quite easy,” Hulya Vassail said at the end of the exercise. “It’s just simple map reading.” I asked which tests were harder for her. “That’s personal,” she said, then answered: “For me, the climbing is the hardest.”

Krommenacker, who also made it, pointed out another candidate to watch, a young man with light brown hair named Gaël Marty, who had pursued sport climbing to a competition standard before giving that up, though he still worked as an instructor.

“I think 300 days a year to train in the climbing gym, it’s hard,” Marty would tell me later, explaining his change of direction. “I want to ski, climb ice, and not do the same thing every day.” 

That night, there were 66 names left when Marsigny posted his list. The real winnowing would happen the following day: on the ice.

In the past, when the current generation of senior guides were doing their Probatoires, the ice test took place on the Bossons Glacier, the tumbling expanse of steep ice that falls from the north face of Mont Blanc towards Chamonix. In the eighties, the Bossons reached down to within a few minutes’ walk of the road, but no longer. Climate change has withered the ice fields, and the Bossons has retreated up the hillside. This has left a scrubbed moraine landscape, edged with trees, whose exposed rock and lack of vegetation make it look like land scarred by industry. 

In response, ENSA moved the exam to the Mer de Glace, France’s longest valley glacier, but it retreated, too, and now the test takes place on the Glacier du Tour, the last bowl before the Swiss border. On the morning of July 2, a Tuesday, candidates gathered at the cable-car station at Le Tour, the roadhead.

After a gondola and chairlift ride, followed by 90 minutes of marching uphill on grassy slopes, the trail contoured up the valley and onto the lateral moraine. There, candidates put on their crampons, almost universally worn over lightweight boots like La Sportiva Trangos, with no lip at the front. They set out for individual stations. Today there were four, located in crevasses on the glacier, overseen by Philippe Batoux, an ENSA guide who was in charge of the ice test.

The test involved various traverses on steep ice that gauged candidates’ skills with crampons and ice axes. When it came time for the four remaining women to make the final climb, Hulya Vassail went first, moving rapidly up the ice. On the traverse, she neatly hooked her axes over her shoulders to swap them as she went left. She easily beat the time limit of six minutes.

Mélanie Martinot struggled. When the six-minute mark arrived, she was toward the end of the route, but she hadn’t done her downclimb. “It’s not great,” she said afterward. “I don’t know what decision they’ll make. But it could be elimination.” 

Aurélia Lanoë got through with another solid performance, but Valentine Fabre had a tough day and was too slow. “I was

really stressed,” she explained later. “I didn’t have the capability, I couldn’t perform. I’d lost all my confidence, everything.”

That night, when Marsigny emerged with the results, Martinot, Lanoë, and Vassail advanced, while Fabre was eliminated. She wasn’t alone. There were only 50 names left on the list. The ice had taken its toll.

Two days of rock-climbing tests followed the ice day. The first, the mixed-terrain test, would be done in mountaineering boots. The second, on steeper slopes, called for rock shoes. Day one happened above Vallorcine, ten miles up the valley, close to the Swiss border. The candidates’ interpretation of climbing boots that day was pretty light: the same light boots worn on the glacier.

From the car park in Vallorcine, the candidates were ordered to do a stout approach march of 3,773 feet, with two hours to finish. The pack weights were now the same for men and women: 13.2 pounds. Between the two tests, Marsigny had gotten an anonymous letter that bemoaned the perceived double standard.

“Introducing women is a good idea, no doubt,” it said. “But there is an issue with the weight of the packs. … Asking for a different pack for a woman is the same as asking for a lighter pack for someone in a delicate situation.” Marsigny denied that the letter spurred a policy change, saying the decision had already been made.

The path threaded up from the valley floor, rising through the forest and above timberline toward the clustered huts of the Refuge de Loriaz, at 6,627 feet. From there, the candidates hiked to a ridgeline 1,135 feet farther up. Krommenacker, the ex-banker, explained that the long approach, which had a time limit, was designed “to make it difficult to pull off a miracle.” That is, if you’ve just yomped up almost 4,000 feet, you’re not going to climb beyond your usual level.

The ridge was rocky and bare. Candidates pulled on their harnesses and came down to the first climb, where they were watched by the instructors. Three took off at any one time, belayed by their successors, in lanes marked with red and white tape. As with much of the Chamonix Valley, the cliff was bolted for protection, and the required climbing level was roughly equivalent to 5.10a. After the climb, the candidates traversed the ridgeline to the next obstacle, a steep descent. On the crest perched Pierre Gourdin, an ENSA instructor who had worked in British Columbia.

“Do I have time?” a nervous candidate asked him, fussing with his pack. 

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Calm, calm, breathe, prepare everything. Be calm, this isn’t the assessment. Take the time to go up.”

The next test was a steep crag descent, with candidates judged on speed and style. From there, a fixed rope ran down and into boulder-strewn waste below the ridge, toward the obstacle that, for some, illustrated the insanity of the Probatoire: boulder parcours. In this challenge, candidates are expected to run through a boulder field at high speed. Quickness is a major judging factor.

Guide Caroline George has some doubts about the test. “I can’t remember the last time I had to run through a boulder field with clients,” she says. “So I don’t see how it’s pertinent other than to show that you have good proprioception.”Marsigny insists it’s a valid challenge. “It’s there to assess the agility of the candidate in difficult terrain,” he says. “I don’t have reliable data regarding accidents.”

Up above the Refuge de Loriaz, the candidates pounded around the boulder field. Krommenacker was pleased with his performance; at his age, he knew he had less explosive muscle power than the younger candidates, and he had organized his nutrition carefully for the day, with gels to keep his energy up.

Vassail, after her strong performance on the ice, was worried. She’d fallen on the climb: not an automatic disqualifier, but a bad sign. “That’s a big penalty,” she said. “I’m a bit sad, but above all I’m stressed.”

Afterward, photographer Nicolas Blandin and I walked down with Marsigny and the administrative head of ENSA. At Vallorcine, down by the river, we found Baptiste Obino, the 20-year-old who’d slept in his car in the winter. This time, in better weather, he was living in a tent, which he moved when new venues were announced. His dirtbag creed extended to his footwear, too: his trail shoes were repaired with duct tape. He claimed to be washing in streams. 

That night, as always, Marsigny emerged with his list. Krommenacker, Marty, and Obino all got through. Among the women, Lanoë and Martinot made it. Vassail was out.

It used to end there. Until 2011, the Probatoire finished after the technical tests, but there’s now a final element: a week in the mountains. After Marsigny finished his briefing on Thursday night, he advised the candidates to rest during the weekend.

On the following Monday afternoon, the remaining candidates—41 had passed the rock test—sat in the upstairs library at ENSA. For the second week in a row, they would separate into groups of three or four, each with an instructor, and scatter across the Mont Blanc massif and farther afield. One group would end up on the Nadelhorn and the other 13,000-foot peaks above Zermatt in Switzerland. It was during this assessment week that a Probatoire candidate was killed in 2018, and Marsigny was reluctant to let journalists go along, given the seriousness of the terrain and our relative inexperience.

But on the last day he gave in. He explained that following the candidate’s death—which took place in a fall above the Argentière glacier—they had changed the system. Now, if you’d passed the technical tests but failed the mountain week, you could return to do that part again, without resitting the first tests. The intention was to reduce the pressure on the candidates, a factor Marsigny believed had contributed to the fatal accident.

On the final day, a Friday, I traveled up the Brévent cable car with Marsigny and four candidates. Among them was Mélanie Martinot, one of the two women left. She’d had a bad day in the mountains earlier in the week and knew she was on the brink.

The Brévent stops at 8,284 feet, with an extraordinary panorama of the Mont Blanc massif opposite. After disembarking, we walked down the back side of the ridge over patches of old snow, to the foot of the cliffs that form the north face of the peak. Our objective, a bolted route called Poème à Lou, already had climbers on it, so we moved to the next line over, Le Fin de Babylone, which was also bolted. The hardest pitches on the route were rated 5.10c.

The party set off on two ropes, moving elegantly up the smooth granite. Below, large vultures circled on the thermals. Three hours later, the first rope team came over the broken ground beneath the cable-car station. They unclipped, packed up their gear, and took the first cable car down.

When we got back to ENSA, waiting for the final cut began. It was late afternoon when Marsigny emerged with the sheet. In all, 45 people had passed. Krommenacker, the ex-investment banker, got through. So did Baptiste Obino, the dirtbag, and Lucien Boucansaud, whose father had died when he was 18. I asked him what his dad would think. 

“He’d say he was happy for me,” he said. “I’d say thank you—for all that he gave me.”

Mélanie Martinot didn’t pass; following her wobble the previous day, she was eliminated at the last hurdle. In the hall, standing by the list, she looked utterly devastated. I asked if she would try the exam again. “I don’t know,” she said.

The one woman who passed was Aurélia Lanoë, the van dweller. I asked how she felt it would be to train as the lone woman with all the men for the remainder of the three years of the program. 

“The fact that I’m the only woman, it’s not a big deal,” she said. “I’d have preferred if there were some other women, but I can handle it as it is.”

I asked how she thought the training, due to start in September, would go.

Her reply was all business: “I’ll tell you next year.”

Simon Akam () wrote about Scottish backcountry skiing in November 2017.

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Shortly before noon on April 29 of this year, Graham Doig, a 51-year-old engineer, hiked to the top of ’s Number Four Gully with his 15-year-old son, Finbar. One of a series of steep, granite-walled trenches that bisect the northeast face of Britain’s highest mountain, Number Four Gully rises from around 3,051 feet to a ridgeline at 3,871 feet. It’s an easy climb in winter, but the Doigs, along with other members of the , planned to ski the snow that banked between its walls. That proposition was more challenging, given that the entry gradient is at least 45 degrees.

First to the top were the Doigs, followed by Hamish Frost, a photographer based in Glasgow, and , a photographer shooting for şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř. I came next. Niall McPherson and James Jackson, two officers serving in Scottish regiments of the British Army, formed the rear party with Nicola Jackson, an architect. We broke through the cornice and, on flat ground beyond, stripped the skis from our packs and removed the crampons from our boots. We holstered ice axes and prepared to drop back into the gully for the descent. The view was clear and expansive; beyond the sea inlet of Loch Linnhe, serried hills stretched toward the Atlantic. Nowhere on that broad vista was there a single patch of snow to be seen. It existed only in isolated stashes like the one we’d just climbed.

Scotland’s territory sits mainly between 55 and 60 degrees north. Move that landmass to Canada and you’re in the top half of a province like Alberta. But Scotland’s climate is profoundly different from the Canadian interior. The warm Gulf Stream current, flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, insulates the United Kingdom, keeping it significantly balmier than it should be. (Coastal British Columbia, likewise warmed by its ocean, is a better comparison, says Geoff Monk, who runs Scotland’s .) While much of the Scottish landscape is rugged, the peaks are modest. Ben Nevis, the highest, reaches just 4,413 feet.

Scottish winters played a pivotal role in the development of ice climbing and served as a crucible for some of the world’s hardiest mountaineers. But snow is elusive, and it’s possible for the mountains to be almost bare in the middle of winter. By North American standards, the country is a fundamentally marginal ski destination. It has five lift-served resorts that exist in a continual state of financial precariousness.

Nonetheless, the backcountry scene is exploding in Scotland, a boom driven partly by dramatic improvements in alpine-touring equipment and partly by social media’s ability to spread the word. British Backcountry, a Facebook page established in 2012, has roughly 8,700 members. Some of them are armchair enthusiasts, but in recent years the Inverness Club has seen a 10 to 15 percent annual membership gain. Sales of touring gear are up at the local outlet of Craigdon Mountain Sports.

“In the eight years I’ve been skiing off-piste in Scotland, I’ve gone from only occasionally seeing other skiers to seeing several per day, even in remote areas,” says David Anderson, a research chemist based in Edin­burgh. Accessible backcountry sites can see upwards of 50 skiers and snowboarders on a good day.

There’s irony in this boom, however. According to the , the mean winter temperature rose 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit between 1960 and 2016. Last winter was the fourth-mildest in records dating back to 1910. Backcountry skiing is taking off right as climate change risks turning a niche sport into an impossible one. That speaks to a peculiar aspect of the Scottish character: resilience.

“They are very easily pleased. I think the aspirations are fairly low,” says Keith Geddes, a longtime Scottish ski coach who once trained the national team. “I’ve skied a lot of places, and it’s I think fairly unique just because of the weather. The choice is either get on with it or don’t do it, and the not-doing-it thing is just not conceivable, really.”

“It’s probably one amazing day for every 15 normal days,” says Finbar Doig. “And then every other day is, like, all right. It’s good, though, because you’re skiing.”

“There is a certain bloody-mindedness to some Scots,” says David Torrance, a prominent national political commentator. “The more they’re told not to do something, or told they can’t do something because it’s impossible, the more they want to do it.”

In mid-January, I took the overnight train from London, where I’m based, to Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands. Skiers who live in the shadows of Scottish peaks—or even in the cities of the country’s central belt, two to three hours away—can look out their windows and, if conditions seem right, make a dash for the hills. Choosing when to strike out from London, 540 miles to the south, was much more complicated. The season had started well, with snow in November, but that all melted, and little new cover followed. Snow was forecast for the next weekend, but how much was unclear. I called several Scottish skiers to get their take on probable conditions. It was like staring into a murky crystal ball.

“It’s a difficult one, obviously,” said Graeme Brown, an anesthetist in Glasgow. “There’s obviously a big system going through at the moment, and it’s pretty wild. There’s no base at all, anywhere essentially. I think there’s going to be potentially a decent amount of snowfall over the next couple of days, but it’s potentially falling onto nothing.”

My phone buzzed with a message from Blair Aitken, founder of British Backcountry. “Actually there’s quite a bit forecast to fall on the northern Cairngorms on Thursday, a bit more Friday,” he wrote. “If the wind drops, as it might, and it clears, Saturday could be quite good.”

Brent MacGregor, a Canadian expat who now skis with the , was more circumspect. “It was blowing a hoolie across Drumochter Pass, but there’s not enough snow for any skiing,” he told me by phone from Aviemore. “This weekend is not looking great, to be perfectly honest.”

I decided to go for it anyway, and things actually seemed promising when the overnight train reached Aviemore, which sits about 700 feet above sea level. There were several inches of fresh snow on the platform, a relatively unusual occurrence at such low altitude. I took a taxi to Glenmore Lodge, Scotland’s national outdoor training center. There I met with Aitken, in person a tall, melancholy elementary school teacher. British Backcountry’s Facebook page serves as a clearinghouse for photos and videos of ambitious descents. One regular who posts there, Calum Macintyre, made a parody film with a friend, Adam Gairns, in which they plan a ski day based on a “Wi-Fi and 3G” map of Scotland, hashtagged with the phrase: “Memories fade but selfies last forever.”

Today we’d ski with two childhood friends of Aitken’s who used to race—Gavin Carruthers, also a teacher, and David Anderson, the Edinburgh chemist. As we prepped gear in the parking lot, the sky leaden overhead, I asked if I should pack sunscreen. They looked at me as if I’d proposed bringing a rhinoceros.

With snow cover lower down the mountains than usual, we were able to skin through the woods. Just before we reached a pool called Lochan Uaine (“Small Green Lake”), we turned left up a mountain called Meall a’Bhuachaille. We stopped short of its 2,657-foot summit. The descent, on a limited quantity of fresh snow thinly blanketing the heather, was sketchy and challenging; I was surprised that this was even considered skiing. Aitken later found better conditions by dropping into a steep line at an area called Creag Loisgte. “When I skied the trees at the top in that second run, that was like the Alps,” he later said.

That afternoon we drove to Resort, where a funicular railway climbs to a high plateau. At the exit, the wind howled and there was almost no visibility. I pulled on mittens, which iced up. We traversed around the hillside and dropped, on better snow this time, some 1,312 feet toward Strath Nethy, skiing into one of the deep valleys that drill the Cairngorm plateau. Skinning back up, we regained the plateau and hit a track off the summit of Cairn Gorm itself. Everything—rocks, fences, Gore-Tex—was rimed with ice. The scene resembled Hoth, the ice planet in the opening scene of The Empire Strikes Back.

Six miles north of Aviemore, where I left Aitken, Carruthers, and Anderson, I sat eating in a rented house in Boat of Garten, a small village, with a party from the Edinburgh Ski Touring Club. Earlier, Ingrid Baber, who organized this trip, had explained how the club reconciles the requirement for a predictable weekend program with fickle Scottish weather.

“The places we stay, some of them we reserve a year in advance, because the smaller huts get booked up,” she said. “Then we just take our chances. But for us it’s no big deal. We drive up two and a half hours and we’re in Aviemore. If there’s no snow, then we go
cycling or walking or whatever.”

I asked the various diners how often they were actually able to ski in Scotland. Their collective response: depends what you mean by skiing. The accuracy of Baber’s statement came home the next morning on the Pass of Drumochter, a broad, U-shaped valley south of Aviemore. The temperature had shot up overnight, and all was damp and thawing.

“If it’s not six degrees and raining, why would you bother?” quipped Clare Swindells, another group member, referring to the 42.8 Fahrenheit that our cars registered on the drive down.

We skied up patches of snow between heather and then linked the patches to make a descent of sorts. This group was older than Aitken’s crowd but extremely fit. At one point, I asked 68-year-old Brian Donaldson why he liked skiing in Scotland. As the wind howled, he threw my question back at me.

“Why I like skiing in Scotland? Well, the company that you ski with. We live here, so it’s easy to get to. You get some magic days, and you only get that when you’re here and you can go on the day.”

“Is this a typical Scottish ski day?”

“No. Well. It’s… you do get some of these every year. And you’ll go and do it, especially at the end of the season, just to get out.

“It gets better, honest,” he added.

In addition to the Edinburgh Club, other people share this determination to make the best of an often bad deal. After receiving a cancer diagnosis, Helen Rennie, a teacher from Inverness, made it a goal to ski in Scotland every month for a year, using the patches of semipermanent snow that linger in deep gullies and on north-facing slopes into the summer. She accomplished that goal and kept going. “I started in November 2009 and have skied on Scottish snow every month since, making a total of 95 months,” she told me. Her definition of skiing is broad, of course, never more so than in the summer of 2017, following the poor winter.

“This August I had to carry my skis and boots for the best part of 11 miles to find the only remaining patch of snow on the Cairngorm plateau, on the northeast side of the north top of Ben Macdui,” she said. “It was diamond shaped and 3 meters by 2.25 meters.” That’s roughly 10 feet by 7.5 feet. Rennie’s skis are five feet long, so, as she recalled, “I had to start with them hanging off the back for one turn!”

The semipermanent snow patches vanished completely during just three years in the 20th century—1933, 1959, and 1996. In the 21st century that picture has changed: they failed to survive in both 2003 and 2006. “It’s highly likely they’ll disappear this year,” says Iain Cameron, the man behind another cultish Facebook page, Snow Patches in Scotland.

Discussion on Cameron’s page tends to the anthropomorphic, as if the melting snow was cause for bereavement. “A few of today’s Cairngorms patches for you,” Nic Bullivant wrote in a July 1 post, alongside photos. “Coire an Lochain (Cairngorm) was just hanging in there, about the size of a sixpence.”

“Still a wee bit left,” David Kellie, captioning a similar shot, wrote ten days later.

Newcomers to this community can be surprised, to say the least. “I was amazed at how much effort people will go to in Scotland to ski the tiny bits of snow they have,” says Jack Mullner, a British filmmaker based in Switzerland who directed Late, an account of an end-of-season adventure by Scottish freeriders. “We had been hiking for hours and hours to get to this tiny bit of snow, and we got up there and there was another guy, just walking along the top with his skis, like: Oh, hello!”

In the weeks after my first trip, as winter still failed to materialize, social-media chatter grew frantic. “Are the gullies on the north face of the Ben holding snow? Desperate times,” Blair Aitken wrote on January 18. “It’s approaching February and we have a stubborn high pressure. Not a good situation. Could this be Scotland’s worst ski season? Thoughts?” Rob Grant added on the 25th. “Let’s all move to Iceland,” Gordon Fraser suggested on February 17.

On several nights in early March, I called Di Gilbert, a mountaineering instructor who in 2012 cofounded a race series called Skimo Scotland. I wanted to know if a competition scheduled for the following weekend at Nevis Range, a ski resort on the west coast, would indeed take place.

“I’m always on the fence, because it can all change in the 24 hours before a race day,” she told me on Tuesday of that week. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got enough snow to have a course—of sorts. But they are forecasting big winds on Thursday, and I haven’t seen a forecast today, so that is going on yesterday’s forecast.”

On Friday: still iffy. “It’s four degrees here now”—39.2 degrees Fahrenheit—“so that must be bringing down more snow on the hill,” she said. “As long as winds are not horrendous, I reckon we will get a race somewhere.”

That was all the certainty I would get. I took a train north that night.

There was no snow on the platform at Aviemore this time. Tickets to Fort William, the nearest station to Nevis Range, had sold out, but I arranged to catch a lift with Jim Savege, the chief executive of Aberdeenshire’s town council. Savege was driving over from the east coast and passing through. He’s originally from England, but he had Scottish grandparents and has immersed himself in the country’s ski culture since he moved north in 2015.

He drove us past wet, cloud-plugged glens toward the west coast. Across Scotland, organizers who had put together ambitious ski programs and races based on previous good years were giving up in the face of the 2016–17 snow drought. The Scottish Freedom free­ride event, scheduled for that weekend at the Glencoe Mountain Resort, had just been postponed. Still, ski-mountaineering races require only a narrow track of snow to skin along on—and Gilbert got what she needed.

At Nevis Range, there was no snow at the base station of the gondola. At the top station, there were patches and a handful of pistes open, but by no stretch could the place be called a snow-covered mountain. At a chairlift in the rain, I met up with Kenny Biggin, author of off-piste guidebooks to Ben Nevis and Glencoe. Later we spoke inside a slopeside café, and he had the acute look of a parent hoping to exhibit his child’s skills—in spelling, a sport, whatever—on a day when the child was determined not to perform.

“I mean, you can see for yourself that if you’re coming up from London it’s a nightmare, because unless you happen to get lucky with good conditions, or you’re really keen, then it’s hard,” he said. “But for us who live close to it, you can wait for the good days and then just go. Look out the window in the morning and go.”

March 18 was not a good day. During the pre-race briefing, we gathered in driving rain outside the café. “The plan today is we’re all going to have a little adventure,” said Gilbert, who completed the Seven Summits in 2010. She gave a lengthy exposition of the route. Having never visited the mountain before, I found it incomprehensible.

“At the top of the summit tow, the top of the mountain, basically, there is no marshal. It’s too grim,” she said reassuringly. “But ski patrol have barriered off the area, so you can’t go into that off-piste place and die.”

The advertised course was about five miles long, with some 3,117 feet of climbing. (Conditions forced organizers to shorten it somewhat.) The field was 19 skiers strong; many wore speed suits and had race skis. I used a heavy, beat-up old pair of Atomic all-mountain skis.

Once the race got under way, we dashed through bogs and mud carrying our skis, then skinned up a lift track and descended on sketchy snow. Marshals ringing bells loomed out of scant visibility. The event was brutal. When I returned one hour, 19 minutes, 28 seconds later, sodden and absolutely exhausted, Gilbert cheerfully informed me: “It’s an acquired taste.”

The day’s champion was Finlay Wild, a whip-thin mountain runner who has won an annual footrace up and down Ben Nevis seven times. In the snowy winter of 2010, Wild, along with his mountain-guide father, Roger, completed a “Scottish haute route” across the country, from Ben Nevis to the Cairngorms, a feat last achieved on skis in the altogether snowier 1970s. Even in the lavish year of 2010, this venture was somewhat sketchy.

“Up in the mountains we were on skis,” Finlay recalled. “Down in the valley sometimes, we were hopping between patches, on heather. Actually, as you’ve seen today, you can ski with remarkably little snow. There was a lot of grass in some of that traverse. One part we were down low, all the snow in the valley had melted, but the river was still frozen, so we skated down the river with grassy banks on each side.”

“We only had to do five or six kilometers of solid walking out of the whole trip,” Roger interjected. “Because all you need is a strip.”

The Wilds are impressive athletes, but as I looked back on Scottish skiing in general, I couldn’t help but think: There’s a kernel of insanity to all this. You can buy a round-trip ticket from Edinburgh to Switzerland for between $80 and $180.

Perhaps the best way to understand such determination to ski is to see it in the context of Scottish culture. That night, in my hotel in Fort William, I watched coverage of the spring conference of the Scottish National Party, which failed three years ago in a referendum that would have broken Scotland away from the United Kingdom. In both skiing and politics, I witnessed a drive to pursue a dream, despite conditions that outsiders might regard as prohibitive.

For my final journey to Scotland, at the end of April, the destination was a well-maintained hut below Ben Nevis, under the mountain’s north face at 2,231 feet. It was the closest British equivalent to a real Alpine hut, with mattresses, propane for cooking, and a wind turbine providing electric light. The walk in was stiff, and from a distance there appeared to be no snow at all on the mountain above. I was with the Inverness Club, and the goal was to try the steep gully skiing that had attracted recent attention online.

This element of the Scottish sport is not new—an early proponent was a man named Harry Jamieson, a fly-rod maker whose client list included Robin Williams, Nick Faldo, and Prince Charles. In the 1980s, Martin Burrows-Smith, then the chief instructor at Glenmore Lodge, expanded the practice using the long skis of the time. “The technical skills of steep skiing must be perfected somewhere absolutely safe,” he warned crisply in the London-based Alpine Journal. “Clearly it would be foolish to experiment at the start of a long and serious descent.”

The landscape was extraordinary. During our approach, the valley seemed wholly free of snow except for tiny filigrees on the summit crags of Ben Nevis. Closer in I saw that the north-facing gullies, which gather snow blown over the summit, were well lined, though less so than in big years.

On Saturday, Number Four Gully was skiable. From a small lake at the bottom, we headed up Number Three, which rises to 4,003 feet. I hacked through the top section with my ice ax and promptly thought better of skiing it, so I downclimbed and waited for the others. The Doigs dropped in and made their descent, trouble-free. As Hamish Frost followed, he fell and cartwheeled past me for around 65 feet, his head narrowly missing a rock. He was unhurt but shaken. My recorder was on, the microphone picking up wind noise and the screeching of skis as he flew past, yelling, “Włó´Ç˛ą!”

“Oh fuck,” I said. “Hamish, you OK?” I yelled up to the others that he appeared to be moving.

“Where’s my ski got to?” Hamish asked from below.

“Your ski’s here with me, as is your pole,” I shouted.

“Think I got my tips crossed,” he said.

The incident drove home the fact that gully skiing can be dangerous. Later I discussed it with Rob Edmonds, founder of the Aviemore ski-touring shop Mountain Spirit and a longtime observer of the Scottish scene. “Down couloirs, if you fall you can bloody hurt yourself,” he said.

Yet for all their hazards, gullies accumulate windblown snow and are more viable to ski in marginal years than open hillsides. Try as you might, 2016–17 was not a winter for long traverses. Going forward, gullies may present the most reliable backcountry terrain.

That night we drank whisky that we had hauled up to the hut and dined magnificently on Nicola Jackson’s “super mountain meal,” a concoction featuring quinoa, grated zucchini, ginger, chorizo, feta cheese, and finely chopped spring onion. After dinner I consulted the avalanche logbook, where visitors recorded slides. One was described as “human triggered, as long as Andy is considered human.”

The next day, we clambered up Observatory Gully. Graham Doig dropped a pack by mistake, which pinballed down at great speed, demonstrating the exposure of the terrain. Two of the party, not liking the steeps, waited below. I headed up toward Gardyloo Gully, which branches off to the left, standing on my front crampons while army officer Niall McPherson got primed to descend from partway up.

Lower down, where the snow ribboned among the rocks, we encountered a couple skiing beautifully. Predictably, they were French: 26-year-old Johan Malleval and 28-year-old Valérie Berthet, both from the Alpine town of Chambéry. They had made a bizarre vacation plan and chose to come ski in Scotland.

“We have a camper van. We slept in a parking lot, and we left at eight in the morning,” Malleval said in French.

“When we set off, we thought: There’s no snow. But finally there was snow, and it was very good,” Berthet added. “But a lot of wind today.”

Berthet was preoccupied by the weather. “Is there always wind like this here?”

I translated for the others. Hamish Frost, below us, looked up and, with the benefit of local experience, casually said: “Sometimes it’s windier.”

British writer Simon Akam () is the author of a forthcoming book on the british military, The Changing of the Guard. Ben Read () is an şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř contributing photographer.

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