DNot crowded are the seventeenth-century slate-roofed stone houses in the village center of La Grave. You are enthroned high above the wild Romanche river on a rocky spur opposite the forbidding north face of the 3982 meter high La Meije, which is famous in mountaineering circles. The defiant buildings line narrow streets that lead up to the wonderful Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption church, built in the Roman-Lombard style. It continues to shape the image of La Grave. Only a few, somewhat old-fashioned-looking inns have been added to the outskirts of the village, which has fewer than five hundred inhabitants. Otherwise, time seems to have stopped here some fifty years ago.
The ride on La Grave’s only cable car is also like a journey through time. It leads from the village square at an altitude of 1450 meters up to the Col des Ruillans, up to 3200 meters at the edge of the mighty Glacier de la Girose. The Cologne cable car manufacturer PHB, which has long since disappeared from the market, supplied the group gondola in 1976. It groans and rattles under the weight of its years. If one of the groups of five six-seater gondolas reaches a station, the entire train comes to a standstill. The gondolas on the route then hang motionless in a silent emptiness, as if the old train wanted to catch its breath. In these moments of stopping, only the scratched cabin windows cloud the captivating view of the opposite granite pillars, seracs and hanging glaciers of Le Râteau and La Meije.
In the intoxication of modernity
Even more remarkable than the cable car rarity with its high mountain scenery, however, is what happens under its regularly resting, orange-red gondolas. In order to understand this, you have to know how a ski area normally works: so that the crowd of guests can experience centrifugal forces and gravity in the snow safely and relaxed, powerful machines ensure corduroy, easy-to-navigate slopes every night. Detonation cable cars, gas-filled detonation tubes and support structures protect these slopes and the heated and padded ascent aids and their users from the risk of avalanches. Since customers are looking for variety, they expect many kilometers of slopes, which in turn require many lifts to open up. But they only pay off if there are a corresponding number of guests. Many beds are needed to accommodate them.
Landscape instead of mass accommodation: view of the hanging glacier from Le Râteau.
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Bild: picture-alliance
The French were the first to grasp this principle. When mayors, farmers and hoteliers in the German-speaking Alps were still haphazardly building lifts and cable cars on mountains during the ski boom at the end of the 1960s that were actually completely unsuitable for successful skiing because they were too steep, too low or too far away from any beds or residents – or all together – the French approached the issue with military precision, from the very top. Here the government in Paris planned to build large ski stations with the aim of stopping the rural exodus from the mountain valleys. With foresight, the focus was on high altitude areas with guaranteed snow, as well as areas with plenty of space and suitable terrain for those who were yet to become skiers. In the intoxication of modernity, gigantic buildings with tens of thousands of beds with tens of thousands of beds arose on previously lonely alpine pastures, exemplary in terms of space-saving and efficiency, but from today’s perspective in some cases of downright monstrous ugliness. The guests accepted it for the convenience of being able to jump straight from bed into their bindings in the morning and be able to swing down the slopes to their front door in the evening.
