Saint-Martin-de-Belleville

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.

The young people were abandoning the mountain farms in droves, heading down to the factories in Albertville and Chambery because you simply couldn't make a living farming cows on those steep slopes.

Villages were emptying out, schools were closing, and the valley was heading towards complete abandonment.

That was until the local mayor of Saint Martin de Belleville stepped in, a bloke named Joseph Fontanet.

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