We walk up to Fort de la Platte

The last 50 metres (Sam and Lucy are on the ridge)

I got an early e-mail from my friend Chris to say that his little boy (Sonny) had not been very well during the night, so we couldn't meet up as planned.

What should we do, go to ski in La Plagne, have a last ski in Les Arcs or do something different? I've always wanted to walk up to the Fort de la Platte above Bourg-Saint-Maurice, so we decided to do that.

Sam and Lucy had walked up in December and had tried again in February with showshoes, but had been turned back by deep snow and avalanches. The sign in Villaret says it is a three-and-a-half-hour walk up to the Fort. Sam said the route was fairly easy once you were above Granville (the abandoned village), so we set off after breakfast.

Margaret didn't come with us, so that meant I had to try to keep up with Sam and Lucy, which is quite hard work. I had a couple of breaks for a good puff on the way up to Granville and, just below the village, we were able to stand and watch a number of marmots in the field where we saw them earlier in the holiday.

This time there were three of them and they seemed quite unperturbed by our presence. A couple of them were moving around on the hillside, flicking their tails up and down. It looked as if they were marking out their territory. They were very busy!

Once through the village, we left the old mule track and joined a modern road. This was steep and narrow but a more gentle incline and it zig-zagged up the mountainside. As we climbed higher, the weather (although still sunny) got quite a bit colder and it was clear that spring had not yet reached these higher pastures. The grass was still brown and there were none of the cowslips and violets on the lower slopes.

Instead, the ground was covered with thousands and thousands of wild crocus. These were the size of the early species varieties you buy for your garden, but mainly pure white, with perhaps 15 per cent of them in blue. It was quite a sight and where the sun was shining, the flowers were wide open.

Higher up, the views opened out, although the mountains in the direction of Beaufort were shrouded in cloud. It was getting colder – I’d gone out in just shirt and trousers and I was feeling chilly, despite some pretty brisk walking. Sam was in shorts and T-shirt and I was surprised he wasn’t complaining.

Thousands and thousands of wild crocus
cover the higher slopes

At one point, there’s a cross planted at the side of the road and you can turn off on the Tour de Haute Tarentaise and walk around above Vulmix. The deep valley that separates Villaret from Vulmix at 1000 metres reached its head at this point. There was a strong stream of water gushing off the higher mountains, but the path/road went over this.

We carried on towards the fort, now walking without the sun (and it was even chillier).

The fort stands on a nose of hillside so that it has a wide view (field of fire). From the approach it looks quite small, but once you get up to it, there’s a defensive ditch with a bridge across into the stone-built enclosure and you can see a small central block with a set of steps up to the ramparts.

There was still a lot of snow in banks on the road as we neared the fort and, inside the building, it was snow and ice. Standing on the ramparts, you can see why it was built here. At 2000 metres, it commands a great view up the valley towards Tignes and Val d’Isere (where there’s a small pass into another valley), you can see the Col de Petit St Bernard coming down the side of the mountain by La Rosiere, you can see the Roselend Pass and you can see the valley below running out towards La Plagne and Moutiers. There's a video panorama here.

A battery of guns up here would be able to shoot-up anything moving along the valley floor and command three passes (one into Italy).

Of course, the fort’s life was short-lived – aircraft and better artillery would have rendered it useless in the 20th century; presumably it was built to prevent an invasion from Italy and, of course, that invasion never came. Nowadays, it serves as a place where cheese is sold by local farmers in the summer and as a destination for the more energetic.

We didn’t spend long up there. Sam said he was freezing (and it was pretty cold). I said he could have my cagoule and I thought I was being generous, but he scolded me for not giving it to him earlier, put it on and ran downhill to get warm.

Lucy and I caught up with him lower down where we had some water and chocolate. The walk down is much easier (of course) and we actually met a couple of cars. There’s a place a couple of hundred metres below the fort where they launch hang-gliders and we thought they were heading up to that point. They wouldn’t have got much further as snow banks were piled up on the hairpin bends just above there.

I wouldn’t fancy driving up. The road is gravel on the straights and tarmac on the hairpins; there are no real passing places and the drop is often quite hairy. It made the road up to the Col du Pre seem quite tame in comparison. There's an iPhone panorama below:

La Plagne and Le Tunnel

Skiing through Le Tunnel

I'd arranged to meet my former work colleague Chris Perera in La Plagne on Tuesday, so on Monday we decided to go across and have a little pootle around just to get to know some of the slopes.

When I was across in March, Sam and I had taken the Vanoise Express cable car across from Les Arcs to La Plagne, but this time we decided to drive. There's a place at the bottom (just off the main road) where you can buy a ski pass, then it's a long drive up the mountain through a series of helpfully numbered hairpin bends.

There are a number of resorts where you can park and get a chairlift up into the main bowl, but the lower ones now have little snow. Some of the runs are closed and those that would be open would offer a long, slushy ski back. We kept on the road to nearer the top where it was much colder, still freezing in fact.

I find La Plagne a little confusing. The individual resorts have quite similar names, they are closely spaced and one looks very much like another. The architecture looks a little more classy than Les Arcs (with the exception of 1950) and the runs are more densely packed, although you can range quite wide if you want to.

We did a small number of blues and my skiing was much improved over the previous day's. It is in your head - conditions were better, but I was also in a better place mentally; I was determined not to be so useless.

Having said that, I almost skied off down one of the hardest reds in the resort, but I even managed the start of that without difficulty. The run we'd come to recce was Le Tunnel, a long blue, steep in places but nice and wide and with plenty of undulation. It's a good run, but its main distinguishing feature is (and the name gives it away) a tunnel in the middle of the run.

The tunnel is around 100 metres perhaps, gentle descent inside and as you ski through, animal shapes are projected onto the floor and sides and there are animal sounds as well. It's quite good fun. I was happy with my skiing and looking forward to meeting Chris the next day. We skied the morning and, in the afternoon, I thought it would be nice for Margaret to see Arc 1600 and maybe have a late lunch up there.

We'd had a nice pizza in the square back in February, but it had been freezing cold and we'd had to sit inside. It was quite different today - the sun was strong and it was pleasant to sit outside, despite quite a gusty wind. The snow had gone from the square and also from around the lower lifts, so skiers were having to use a narrow strip of snow or ski across mats. The learner area was completely devoid of snow and the place where we used to meet for ESF lessons was now grass.

After lunch, we drove back down to town and called in at Super U to fill up with diesel at €1.33 a litre and also get my sister a French Easter egg. We got her a chocolate hen, sitting on the chocolate nest full of chocolate eggs. It's not the sort of thing you see in the UK. I also picked up a bottle of Genepi, which I've developed a taste for. Basically, it's alcohol and sugar flavoured with wormwood.

We also bought four fillet steaks and some oven chips so that we could have steak and chips for our last meal in Villaret the next night. Plans for that were scuppered when Adam (the chap who owns our chalet) came round in the evening and invited us all to eat with his family the next day. He was there with his partner, two children and his in-laws. His mother-in-law, who sounds slightly German, had suffered an unfortunate accident the day before. She'd been hit awkwardly by a chairlift, had failed to get seated properly and had fallen off just after it left the entry point. She'd fallen about 10 feet and had fractured her leg. She's a very slight woman of 73-ish and a good skier. Anyway, we were pleased to go for dinner, but it meant I missed my steak and chips, while Sam and Lucy had double helpings.