BY THE LIGHT OF THE MILKY WAY
THE SKIN TRACK
ZIGZAGS UP THE REMNANTS OF AN OLD SKI RUN. A Poma lift on the left, a couple of out-of-commission snow guns on the right, and some crude grading is all that distinguishes this “piste” from the surrounding featureless alpine terrain. The only clue that this same run in Sestriere, Italy, hosted the world’s best GS skiers in the 2006 Olympics, including Benjamin Raich, Hermann Maier, and Julia Mancuso, is a couple of start houses on the far right of the slope. During the 2006 Games, the entire ski world’s attention was focused on this slice of mountain near the Italian-French border—by train about five hours from Paris and an hour from Turin, Italy, or by car, three hours south of Chamonix—yet today the surface lift rarely runs and the majority of ski traffic is uphill, a jumping-off point to the expansive back bowls and couloirs in a small pocket of the Milky Way ski system.
The group of small- to medium-sized ski areas, known locally as the Via Lattea, is comprised of over 70 lifts that connect eight different villages in the southwestern Alps. It’s mid-March and I’m here with Kiwi Sam Smoothy and Chamonix-based photographer Jeremy Bernard. The region has been getting hammered by snowfall all winter, thanks in part to an extremely localized weather phenomenon known as The weather pattern, which literally translates to “return from the east,” occurs when low pressure forms over the Gulf of Genoa, the large body of water off the Italian Riviera, and feeds continuous moisture from the Mediterranean to the Alps from the east. With no real foothills to blunt the impact of moisture, certain locations can see extended periods of heavy snowfall. This past January, a single storm produced over six feet
