These are ideas for professionally guided outings, not route directions. Beyond the marked pistes, avalanches, cliffs and glacier hazards demand specialist judgement. Choose the day’s route with an appropriately qualified local professional; carry a transceiver, shovel and probe and know how to use them.

Icons describe terrain, skiing demands and walking, including route variants. Skiing labels are descriptive, not official grades. Open terrain describes the landscape, not the snow conditions; a missing terrain icon does not mean that feature is absent.

Pissaillas

Open terrain
Skiing: Gentler options
Walking: Normally no walking

High in the Pissaillas sector, Pays Désert is all space, rolling snow and mountain views. Gentler options give it a different character from the steeper valley descents. A short walk or skin can open up variations in this high-mountain setting.

Fredrik’s experience

High on the glacier

Pays Désert starts at the highest lift-served point on the Val d’Isère side, on the Pissaillas glacier, all the way up the Montets draglift. The start is very flat. You can see much of the run from the Cascade chairlift on the way up, which gives you a sense of the open country you are heading into.

Visibility and local knowledge

Local knowledge matters here. Know where you are going rather than blindly following somebody else’s tracks, and adapt the route to the conditions. This is high, open terrain with very few features to help you find your way. In fog or flat light, orientation can become difficult very quickly. I would leave it for a day with good visibility.

Retour d’est and wind

In my experience, Pays Désert can have fantastic snow after a retour d’est, when weather comes in from the Italian side. The snowfall can be very localised, with a lot falling in one area. But this is also exposed to the wind. Strong wind beforehand can leave wind-packed snow that is much harder to ski, so find out what the wind has been doing as well as what it is doing now.

Open slopes and a sense of achievement

Most of the slopes are moderate, with some steeper sections along the way. Those steeper sections need an avalanche assessment; we ski them one at a time when that is the guide’s decision for the conditions. On the gentler parts, we have often been able to ski together as a group. That is part of the pleasure of the run, but the decision still depends on the snow and the slopes around you.

On a sunny day, this can be a lovely outing for less experienced off-piste skiers. The open slopes and relatively straightforward skiing can leave you feeling that you have really achieved something. For me, it is an open-field run with fairly low technical difficulty.

The return lift matters

There is one practical detail you really do not want to miss: make sure the Pays Désert return draglift is operating before committing to the run. Normally there is no walking, but if that lift is not running, my estimate is a walk of a few hundred metres. That is worth knowing before you set off, not discovering at the bottom.

Fredrik’s experience describes the run’s technical difficulty. Avalanche exposure, visibility and the return still need assessing with your guide for the day.

Sources

A skier carving through powder on a broad snow-covered slope, with curved tracks in the foreground and mountain ridges beneath a blue sky — Pays Désert · Pissaillas sector

Photo by Fredrik Lennström

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