The future of cult French ski resort La Grave is finally secure
A recent official announcement from France’s renowned off-piste ski destination La Grave that the 30-year lease for its lift system has been awarded to the nearby resort of Alpe d’Huez ends years of suspense about who would win it. But is La Grave’s future really any brighter or more secure? As the French say, “Plus ça change” – the more it changes, the more it stays the same.
La Grave has been facing threats to its sauvage (wild) nature – it has only two pistes – and its long-running, two-stage téléphérique (gondola) since its earliest inception as a ski destination in the 1980s. During the first decade of its life, while it was run by the town of La Grave, the lift was closed more often than it was open because of management and financing issues. At one point the distinctive rainbow-coloured cabins lay dormant for 18 months before the lift’s rescue in 1987 by Denis Creissels, the man who designed it (and the Aiguille du Midi cable car in Chamonix). Creissels paid La Grave’s commune (town) the token sum of one franc (10 pence in those days) for a 30-year lease on the lift and established the Téléphérique des Glaciers de la Meije (TGM) to run it.
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Now, the lift’s future appears to have been secured thanks to the Société d'Aménagement Touristique de l'Alpe d'Huez (SATA). On May 11, a month before TGM’s lease expires on June 15, La Grave’s mayor signed the new contract with SATA, which paid €100,000 for a 30-year lease on the gondola and ski terrain. The contract stipulates that SATA will maintain and modernise the lift where necessary and install a new gondola to run from the existing top station (3,200m) to the top of the ski area (3,600m). This will eventually replace the drag lift that currently runs from just above the gondola to 3,530m.
SATA must also maintain the two pistes that currently flank that drag lift and, environmental and financial conditions permitting, create a new piste to run the length of the new gondola. Furthermore, it must establish a dedicated company, based in La Grave, to operate the mountain, modernise the two existing mountain restaurants, keep current employees, and employ new staff locally where possible. There can also be no “significant” increase in lift ticket prices – whatever that means.
Critically for fans of La Grave’s rugged spirit and terrain, the contract dictates that the resort’s sauvage high-altitude nature must be retained. Terrain below 3,200m must be kept unpisted and unsecured, and the obsolete lifts that scar some of the ski area must be removed. Furthermore, it looks like La Grave’s unique system of responsibility will be retained – the mayor is liable for any accidents, injuries or deaths that occur on the mountain, which helps to protect the lift company from the kind of liability claims that lead to resorts being safeguarded by countless ropes, pistes, signs and restrictions.
When I visited La Grave in April, locals seemed confident that its naturally forbidding terrain would determine the outcome of this chapter in the town’s history and that the mayor, a veteran ski guide and passionate advocate of ski sauvage, would preserve its integrity. After years of uncertainty, they appear happy. As Camille Gaillard, instructor at the local ESF, says: “I’m basically pleased that SATA has taken on La Grave. They want to work with locals, listened to our experience of the terrain and seem to have a ‘human’ management approach. Primarily, we’re just pleased to have a buyer – closure was the worst case scenario!”
However, the storm clouds above La Grave haven’t cleared entirely. SATA and Compagnie des Alpes (which owns neighbouring Les Deux Alpes) have both declined to comment on long-discussed plans to link Alpe d’Huez and Les Deux Alpes. However, the mayor of Alpe d’Huez recently announced that the resorts will be linked by gondola in 2021, creating a joint ski area of 475km – larger than that of the linked resorts of Val d’Isère and Tignes. As La Grave and Les Deux Alpes are already linked, this would place La Grave within one of Europe’s largest linked ski areas, a situation that grates with the rugged, anti-consumerist town ethic.
Locals seem doubtful: “There’s been talk of this link since I was born here 27 years ago,” says Camille. “Given the environmental concerns, I doubt it will happen. Besides which, La Grave suffers from an important weak point: how to get here. There’s no motorway and no train, just rough mountain roads prone to closure.” So, for the moment anyway, it appears that La Grave has lived to see another 30 years of not changing.
