Lone ranger: solo ski touring in Crans Montana

There had been a big music festival the night before and as I set out through the pre-dawn streets people were still tottering home, glasses in hand, smoking their last cigarettes. They looked at my skis and boots reproachfully.

In pine trees close to the start of the Cry d’Er cable car, I fixed skins to the base of my skis and began sliding uphill, following a winding path through the still-dark forest. The noise of the town soon faded, the only sound the crunch and glide of my skis on the snow.

I was out of practice — it had been at least 12 months since my last ski-touring trip — but gradually I found the familiar, reassuring rhythm, the pole plants and pace becoming automatic and my mind wandering free.

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to ski tour a lot — high up in the rugged Tetons, beside barbed-wire border markers in Kashmir, across a lonely glacier in Greenland and along the celebrated Chamonix-Zermatt Haute Route. But this was different: the first time I had ever been touring on my own.

Ordinarily, ski touring — ski de randonnée in French — is about leaving lifts and pistes behind, heading out into the wilderness in search of long, powdery descents. Given the risk of avalanche, exposure, crevasses, serac falls and so on, it would usually be foolhardy without a group of experienced colleagues or a guide.

In Crans-Montana, neither is needed. In December 2017 it launched what it calls the world’s biggest “Rando Parc”, a network of 15 trails that stretch across its ski area, colour-coded according to technical difficulty and ranging from a 1.3km beginners’ route to “La X’treme”, a 34.7km monster with 3,059m of altitude gain. There’s a map and regular signposts and, crucially, the routes are avalanche protected, so you can dispense with your shovel, probe and €500-a-day mountain guide.

The move is part of a wider trend, an evolution of the sport that in the US even has its own name: “uphilling”. Rather than enduring the slog up to “earn their turns”, for uphillers the climb — with its combination of cardio workout, thinking space and fresh air — is the end in itself. The Rando Parc in Crans-Montana is designed so that every route ends with the option of coming back down on a piste or even in a cable car.

Traditionalists might find it laughable to be touring within a ski area, rather than out in the backcountry, but my route took me through forest glades and across Alpine pastures with only the occasional glimpse of piste or cable car. Mist lingered in the branches; a group of chamois stopped and stared at me, holding my gaze until I inched forwards, sending them leaping into the trees. Usually skiing is all about sharing the fun but being here alone had a rare magic.

Established in the late 19th century on a south-facing plateau above the Rhône valley, Crans-Montana seems an unlikely place for such an innovation. Its first visitors were not skiers but convalescents attracted by sanatoriums, exceptional air quality and sunshine. Then came golf — the first course opened in 1906 and today there are four, including one designed by Jack Nicklaus and one by Seve Ballesteros. They help make it a year-round resort, attracting large numbers of wealthy second-home owners and retirees from Geneva and abroad. The shop windows are full of cigars, caviar and Rolexes. The town’s reputation remains closely bound with its most famous former resident, the late Roger Moore — smooth, suave, a little louche; a huge mural of his face stares down from the side of a building in the centre.

Perhaps conscious of the need for an update, the resort now sponsors a very different “ambassador” in the form of Séverine Pont Combe, a long-time resident, star of the ski-mountaineering scene and four-times winner of the Patrouille des Glaciers. She designed the Rando Parc with her coach and husband Nicolas Combe, in part using her existing training routes. And it is already proving popular. “Before, ski touring was just for the very sporty,” Simon Maugin, manager of the Rando Shop (which rents out touring equipment), told me. “But the surprise has been that people who come here mainly for the restaurants are seeing others going uphill and giving it a go themselves.”

Shortly after 9.30am I made it to my destination, a minor peak called Bella Lui, 2,543m above sea level. In front, a cable car rose up to the Plaine Morte glacier, but turning back I took in Crans-Montana’s other key asset. Whether you look at it from a Michelin-starred restaurant, a golf course or pumped full of endorphins on a mountain peak, the view is arguably the best in the Alps — stretching across more than 100km and three countries, from Mont Blanc in the west to Mont Fort, the Dent Blanche, Matterhorn, Weisshorn and Monte Leone. I stared for a few minutes, trying to charge myself with the peace before returning to the hubbub of family life, then clipped into my skis for a long descent on deserted pistes.

Tom Robbins was a guest of the Crans-Montana tourist board (crans-montana.ch) and the Swiss tourist board (myswitzerland.com). A Rando pass, letting users descend on the ski lifts, costs SFr5 per day

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