Lewis Sonvico is one such traveller. The first of our riding companions, he arrived in a giant beige plastic motorhome like a refugee from Butlins. A tall, perma-tanned snowboarding instructor of no fixed abode, his go-to riding outfit consists of authentic combat clothing that he picked up while training the British Army Snowboard Team. This particular camo pattern, he assures us, is reserved for Special Forces (“You can’t buy this shit, bruv”). Sharing the cab with Lewis is his French girlfriend Céline and her tiny dog, Marcel. The two of them plan to spend the summer working the land on an organic farm somewhere in the Dordogne, so sharing a vintage caravan is good practise for the simple life. Little do we know that before the winter is out, fights will be breaking out in the supermarket and we’ll all be thinking about growing our own potatoes.
Our crew is completed by Dave Crozier, a diminutive seasonaire and the Scrappy Doo to Lewis’s Shaggy. He hails from the North East of England – where brown ale, even browner surf and professional footballers come from. Indeed, Dave once played fullback for Newcastle Utd’s youth team before discovering snowboarding; his younger cousin plays for the senior squad and enjoys considerably greater wealth. Still, he can’t lay down a eurocarve like Dave.
We squeeze into our boots, almost dry from a night jostling for space beside the heater, and are on the chairlift before the local shuttle bus has even begun depositing skiers from town. The lift system at Ovronnaz occupies a small handful of faces amidst a wilderness of giant peaks, and the pistes all eventually funnel back to the same base station. Over on the untamed side of the valley, mist clings to the forested slopes beneath walls of vertical rock, like a backdrop from The Revenant.
We’ve sampled most of the runs by lunchtime. They’re invariably steep, and eerily quiet amidst the fog. A foot or so of snow has fallen overnight and we spend the afternoon hacking through the trees in search of untouched powder, then it is back to the vans and out of our wet kit and back on the road.