Les Menuires

Because the moment you clip into your bindings in Val Thorens, you are also standing at the high-altitude gateway of the Three Valleys.

With a single pass, you have 600 kilometers of interconnected runs spanning all the way across to Meribel, Courchevel, Les Menuires, and Saint Martin.

It is officially the largest linked ski area on the planet.

You can start your morning on the frozen glaciers above Val Thorens, cruise through the pine forests of Saint Martin for a long lunch, ski over the ridge into Courchevel, and head back home without ever taking off your skis.

Chez Pepe Nicolas is my absolute favourite place in the entire Belleville Valley.

It sits on the slopes between Les Menuires and Val Thorent and it's a historic, working alpine dairy farm that has been in the Suchet family for generations.

It feels completely authentic because it is authentic.

They run a proper permaculture mountain garden right on the slopes during the summer, and they source almost all their dairy and meat from their own cows, goats and local artisan producers.

If your train happens to be delayed by 30 minutes due to railway signaling, you miss your scheduled bus slot and you're stuck waiting on an icy platform for two hours for the next service.

And that coach has to stop at every single tiny village, hamlet, and apartment sector all the way up through Saint Martin and Les Menuires.

What should be a 45-minute drive turns into a two-hour jerky nauseating crawl.

It is the absolute worst way to finish a long journey.

That is an elevation gain of more than 1,800 vertical meters in just 38 kilometers.

It is a massive physical ascent.

The road takes you past the thermal spa town of Salins-les-Thermes, winds through Saint-Jean-de-Belleville, climbs up past the traditional stone chalets of Saint Martin, passes the concrete towers of Les Menuires and then makes that final dramatic pull up above the tree line.

But the higher you climb, the narrower and steeper the road becomes.

Sitting at 2,300 meters, it is officially the highest ski resort in Europe.

When you drive up past Saint Martin de Belleville and Les Menuires, you leave the trees completely behind.

You enter this vast, stark, high-altitude amphitheater of rock, ice, and pure white snow that looks more like a lunar colony than a classic French village.

It genuinely does.

He was a proper heavyweight, a wartime resistance hero, and a senior French government minister.

He looked at the emptying valley and decided the only thing that could save his community from extinction was winter tourism.

Fontanet started by pushing through the creation of Les Menuires in the late '60s.

But while Les Menuires was being built, he crossed paths with a brilliant, totally uncompromising developer named Pierre Schneebelen.