Ski holiday day 4: over the border into Italy

Today we went to La Rosiere, the next-door resort to Sainte-Foy, and skied down into Italy to La Thuile.

La Rosiere is on the Petit Col de St Bernard, which is closed due to snow for five or six months of the year and the resort actually represents the highest point you can reach by car in winter. It's a hard road of switchback turns even to get that far. Incredible to think that this was the route Hannibal took to attack Rome during the Punic wars. How on earth he got his elephants over what must have been little more than a sheep track beggars belief.

From La Rosiere, there are a couple of long lifts up towards the ridge of the mountain, which also represents the border between France and Italy. We'd got a pass covering both La Rosiere (French side) and La Thuile (Italian side) so we could ski right down. There were a couple of red runs involved, but Lucy said I'd manage those quite easily and, anyway, it was time Sam stopped mollycoddling me! She’s a hard taskmaster!

The wind was whistling in our faces on the lift, then the cloud closed in and it started snowing. We reached the top, where there is an old fort - one of many in this part of the Alps, built in the 19th century to command the mountain passes. It must have been a cold, miserable place to be posted in winter. I don't think any of them saw action and, by the turn of the 20th century, they were  made redundant by superior artillery. Instead of impregnable bastions, they became juicy targets.

La Thuile from the top of the cable car. Pic by Lucy

Anyway, we could barely see the fort in the skidding cloud and snow and then we had a long, cold drag lift to suffer before we could start to ski down.

Visibility was pretty poor and the piste was covered with powder snow in places, which made the edge harder to spot, but ice in other parts where the wind had blown the snow off.

Last year, I tried a couple of different things to see in the snow. My prescription sunglasses work quite well when it's bright and sunny and I had goggles with prescription inserts as well. However, I can't get on with those at all - the effect is like looking through binoculars and it really unsettles my balance because I don't have any peripheral vision.

This year, I have the sunglasses and have also brought contact lenses to use with my goggles. I'll also carry the old prescription inserts to use as reading glasses, so I can read a piste map if need be.

Today, I thought it would be sunny, so I was wearing sunglasses, which definitely weren't needed. Having said that, the runs were not too difficult, but I did ski off one piste when I failed to spot the piste marker pole and went off into the soft snow at the side  and almost buried myself. I had to take a ski off and pretty much roll back onto the piste. Lucy had gone off ahead and the plan was to meet her in La Thuile by skiing the red run which follows the road. In the summer it is the Petit Col St Bernard; in the winter, it's covered in snow and is a ski run. It's quite amusing to ski past the road signs and round the hairpin bends.

We were making progress down the mountain when we were brought to a stop by the piste being closed. We've no idea why - perhaps the snow cover was too thin or there was a risk of avalanche; maybe it was too windy.

Fortunately, there was a cafe right by where we were halted, so we popped in there for a hot chocolate. It was definitely Italy because they were not speaking French. It was a fantastic hot chocolate and one English woman was so happy in the place, she refused to go out into the cold. She said she'd stay there until her husband had finished skiing.

The closed piste gave us a bit of a problem. Sam scratched his head for a while and then we headed up a chairlift onto the Italian slope of the mountain into the ski area above the village of La Thuile. Here the weather was brighter and I enjoyed skiing down to the top of the cable car that comes up from the village. The Italian Special Olympics team were practising in La Thuile and there were lots of handicapped people skiing about.

I think some of them may have been at the "improver" stage because they weren't that good. Others were doing really well (by which I mean much better than me).

We'd just missed Lucy and Sam set off to try to catch her up on the long black down to the village. I sat in the watery sun by the cable car to wait for them. They actually weren't too long; it's surprising how much distance even a poor skier like me can cover. Sam and Lucy can go for miles and miles and do it double quick.

The piste board didn't make great reading. The lift we had planned to take back was closed and so were quite a few more, so we had to try a circuitous route of reds, blues and lifts to get back to La Rosiere. Sam was a bit worried that we might be stuck in Italy overnight and, as he and Lucy had left their passports back in Sainte-Foy, it would have been up to me to book a hotel room and smuggle them in.

It was good to eventually see La Rosiere back in view. The long, wide piste we'd seen from the first chairlift seemed very, very long, but it wasn't hard. I was absolutely pooped (in a good way) and was pleased to have a Ricard and lemon tea in the bar next to the St Bernard Hotel. There were terrific views of the Tarentaise valley on the way down - you could see Arc 2000 with its ugly hotels in the bowl and Arc 1950 just below it, but hardly visible as the buildings blended in so much better. Bourg-saint-Maurice was to your right and, up the valley was Sainte-Foy, Tignes and Val D'Isere.

The sun had come through the clouds and was making superb colours to the south-west as it was setting. I tried to take a picture of it, but all I got was a Renault Clio as we entered yet another hairpin bend.

Looking up the Tarentaise valley towards Tignes and Val D'Isere.