Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

There are times living in Chamonix when you can feel a little bit fake. Sitting at a bar in ski gear that doesn’t look like it was bought in TK-Max the week before, sometimes people have a tendancy to see you as a little more hardcore than you actually are. Sometimes it’s a little too easy to let that fallacy go unchallenged.

So last night, when my friend Andy suggested we do the Vallee Blanche today I couldn’t think of an obvious reason not to. Apart from dying. Skiing the Vallee Blanche is a serious proposition at any time of the year, but in mid-December it’s almost unheard of. It’s usually not until late January that the first skiers start to take it on. But as I may have mentioned - there’s loads of snow.

Why so serious? Well, to ski this route you take the Aiguille Du Midi cable car from town to an altitude of 3842m. Up there, not only is it very cold (-20C+ today), but also if you’re like me you’ll start to feel the effects of altitude sickness. From the Midi, you exit through an ice cave and, wearing crampons on your ski boots, roped to your partner, skis attached to your rucksack and ice axe in hand, you make you way 100 yards down a knife edge snow ridge with mind-numbingly dangerous drops on either side. Later in the season there’s a fixed rope and the arête (as it’s called) is well trodden and easier to negotiate.

So once this not inconsiderable danger is out of the way you’re on the other side of the mountain from the town, with nothing but a 22km completely unpisted, unmarked backcountry decesnt ahead of you over some of the most treacherously crevassed glacial terrain in the alps.

The trouble with skiing on a glacier is avoiding falling in the feckin‘ holes. There’s lots of them, and they’re often covered in snow which makes them impossible to spot. If you fall in, the 50m rope we each carry might not even reach you. As the season goes on, the snow bridges become stronger and the route becomes safer, but this very early in that season. Oh and falling seracs - massive house sized chunks of ice falling off the ice cliffs and crushing you to death. The later in the day, the greater the risk of these as the day warms up, but at least you can see these and avoid skiing underneath them.

So we ski with climbing harnesses on. If we need to be pulled out of a hole, they make a solid point to tie the rope on to. We also carry ice screws, karabiners and other climbing gear so we can create a belay or make ourselves safe from falling deeper into a crevasse and rescue ourselves if the worst happens. With ropes, and the usual avalanche safety gear of transceiver, shovel and probe, not to mention skis, boots, and lots of clothes you need a lot of kit to ski off the midi.

Have I convinced you of the seriousness of the thing yet? :) Good. So there we were on the 11:30 lift this morning and I won’t lie to you, I was pretty frightened. I was frightened thinking about it in bed last night and I was frightened getting my kit together. Today wasn’t about having the most amazing skiing - it was about being adventurous. Because it’s there, and we can.

Which is just as well because the snow was shit. A thick, 2 inch crust looked inviting, but when you broke through it was hard to stay on your feet. Impossible for me until I learned to ski the stuff better, which was a lesson I had to learn very quickly. Down we went, through the steeps, the crevasses, the enormous rock strewn couloirs, all the time skiing with utmost caution, one at a time.

At one point we got stuck at the top of an ice cliff. A better skier than I could have dropped the 10 feet onto the snow bridge and controlled their speed, but not me, and not today. So we set up a snow belay to lower me down over the cliff. Fat lot of good that did. As soon as I put weight on the rope the ice axe pinged out and I fell down the cliff anyway. Still, no harm done.

So an hour later we were threading our way over the flat maze of the Mer De Glace and half an hour after that starting the steep, exhausting climb out of the gully to the hut which marks the start of the track which takes you all the way back down to Chamonix.

Around 4:30pm, with legs giving up their last ounce of strength we finished up in the car park of Les Planards. 1 lift. 3000m vertical drop. 22km of unpisted, intensely challenging skiing, 5 hours. As we unclipped the skis and walked into town for a beer I was happy. Tired beyond normal boundaries of tiredness of course. Wet, stinking and with bleeding lips, but happy I’d decided not to find some lame excuse not to have gone on today’s Petite Envers adventure.

Am I hardcore yet, mum?

I’ve been out of the UK couple of weeks, and notice that I’m feeling much more myself. Calm and happy I’ve got the time and inclination to think, to work and to spend time with other people. I think it’s got a lot to do with being away from the constant bombardment of advertising and commercialism I felt in London. That constant demand to evaluate my life, am I rich/happy enough? have I got all the material goods I’m entitled to? Am I living my life as fully as I should be? Living in a small mountain town in a foreign country where the language is not my own gives me freedom from that and allows me to concentrate on being myself. Things like growing a beard and wearing a silly flat cap.

I’m even starting to read in French little. Albert Camus’ L’Étranger. It’s interesting that etranger is translated as ‘Outsider’ in English. The French use the word to mean foreigner or foreign. It’s a project of mine to start to properly learn French so that even though I can always masquerade as an outsider, a foreigner, I can also be a real part of the community when it suits me.

In a world gone tits up. You’ve just got to love those boys at Modern Toss.

Sunny skies have brought low temperatures and it’s brass monkeys out here. It takes a while to get used to the cold, to get your clothes right and change your living habits. Other problems come up too, like the locks on your car freezing up over night, getting snow and moisture in your car and then coming back to it in the dark evening to find it’s frozen as a thin sheet of ice on the INSIDE of your windows. Driving in general becomes harder not least because of the reduced visibility through frozen windows, but also because of the snow and ice on the roads. There’s plenty of cars in the ditches around the valley every morning.

I picked up a bit of a cold over the last week. Easily done in a ski resort like this where everyone has to huddle together inside in closed environments in the evenings. Germs spread quickly. Spending most of the day in bed yesterday has helped loads, and I reckon I’ll feel well enough to go for a ski in Les Houches tomorrow. In the meantime I’ve got a fair bit of work to do, so It’s probably just as well I’m spending a little time in the office today.