THE SILITCHES HAVE NEVER looked back. They now have two handsome French-speaking boys and a pleasant three-story wood chalet surrounded by the homes of Company guides. One of them, Lionel Pernollet, has become such a close friend that Silitch asked him to be his firstborn's godfather.

"Michael made the choice to live in Chamonix, to learn our language, and to raise his kids in our valley," says Pernollet, a third-generation Company guide. "His kindness and discretion have made it very natural for him to be welcomed and appreciated by the Company."

It was Pernollet who helped Silitch get started, six years ago, by introducing him to Company director Jean-Francois Collignon. "They made me a reinforcement, which was great," Silitch says. He got bumped up a notch to priority reinforcement—meaning he gets first pick of the scraps—in late 2007, after he approached the Company to emphasize again his interest in joining them.

"La Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix represents a brotherhood that I respect," he wrote in immaculate French to the messieurs of the Company. "I will be proud to be a part of it."

There's not much more he can do. He has to wait for a committee of 16 peers to approve him as a stagière, or "apprentice." Company bylaws give people from Chamonix first dibs, followed by France as a whole, followed by the European Union and whoever else. Even if he gets voted in as an apprentice, he'll have to put in two years, and then the entire Company will have to vote on which apprentices can become full members. No more than four make it every year. "When I was younger, working for the Company would have been like playing in the NBA," he says. "Now it's more of an honor thing."

To cap our day of skiing through the Vallée Blanche, Silitch and I make plans to spend the night in a hut off the Aiguille du Midi at around 12,000 feet. Chamonix is littered with huts perched in impossible locations. Some are three stories high, with beds for hundreds of people. Nearly all of them offer hot soup, fresh bread, and wine. So we race into town, where Nina meets us in the family's blue minivan to ferry us to the tram. I hop in back with two-year-old Anders, their youngest.

"In the states, guiding means hauling in a heavy pack, sleeping for weeks in a tent, and being away for a long time," Silitch says. "Here, I ride the tram up, skip the slog in, and climb all day in incredible terrain, and still come home to play with the kids. Guiding is not just something to do in your twenties. Here you can grow old doing it."

He won't go broke, either. There's a joke that the difference between an American mountain guide and a large pepperoni pizza is that the pizza can feed a family. But Silitch does fine, earning about $100,000 a year with a combination of independent and Company-sourced guiding jobs and paid sponsorships from Petzl, Backcountry Access, and the North Face. In the U.S. he'd be lucky to make $30,000.

Silitch hugs Nina and Anders goodbye, and we board the last cable car for the Aiguille du Midi. When we were here a few hours ago with the Parisians, the top station was packed with tourists and Vallée Blanche skiers. Now the scene is hardcore: Down-swaddled mountaineers line the frigid halls in bivy sacks and sort their gear, ready to spend the night in the building. Silitch and I rope up and climb over a railing outside to reach the Cosmique Ridge, a rock fin right off the terminal.

The plan is to work our way down to a snow slope where we can strap on skis and skin up to the Cosmique hut, a metal-and-glass marvel on a promontory at 12,000 feet. It's about $60 a night for a flushing toilet, a warm bunk, a hot dinner, and breakfast. You can sit on the deck, watch deadly seracs collapse off Mont Blanc du Tacul, and then ski for miles into Italy or back to town through the Vallée Blanche.

"Keep me tight here," Silitch shouts as I belay him down a wildly exposed section above a lonely glacier. Clouds surge over the ridge like sea foam; Silitch disappears into the fog. To my right, a door swings open and a tram worker starts sweeping the balcony. I can't tell, but it looks like he's bored.

A storm rolls in just as we make it to the hut, which is empty except for three skiers on vacation from Marseille. The next morning, the storm clears by 10 a.m., so we head back out through the Vallée Blanche. It's the best Vallée experience I've had: boot-deep powder, pink light swaddling purple peaks, no one around. Even Silitch, who's skied it far more times than he can count, calls it great.