"Feel that?" Lance frowns, wild-eyed behind his ski goggles, his ponytail whipping in the wind.

"What?" I reply, aware of little but my own labored breathing here thousands of feet above the Alps' highest ski area, Val Thorens.

"Static electricity!" Lance shouts, motioning at the skis A-framed above my backpack. "It's moving between your skis. Listen and you can hear it buzz." Already the April sky has blackened and started hurling lightning bolts at surrounding peaks. We're clinging to boulders just below the summit of the 11,683-foot Aiguille de Peclet, hoping to clamber up the knife-edge ridge and drop the glacier on the other side. But not if it means playing moth to the hypercharged atmosphere's bug zapper. The humming sounds like bacon frying.

Our partners, Lee and Beej, climb up to our perch. They're followed by two Belgian snowboarders. After skinning for an hour, then booting up a face for 15 minutes, no one wants to do the prudent thing and turn back. One of the Belgians pulls a joint out of his parka and sparks it. "Care to schmoke?" he offers.

A pregnant pause elapses. The alpinists who normally haunt Peclet—rigorously trained professionals from the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations (IFMGA) and their clients—wouldn't dream of toking. Protocol must be considered here. That, and I need a few seconds to free my fingers from my glove. You know what they say: Quand les choses deviennent bizarres, les bizarres deviennent professionnels.

That's the motto of our trip, a 15-day, 200-mile, three-nation (but mostly French), frequently off-piste, do-it-yourself ski trek across the highest reaches of the Alps. Carrying only skis and whatever fits into 55-liter backpacks, we're crossing the original duchy of Savoy, one of France's most mountainous regions (now chopped into two départements, Savoie and Haute-Savoie). Having taken a train to Grenoble, in southeast France, and crossed into Savoie from the apex of Les Deux Alpes resort, we're headed gradually north, before we detour into Italy, then past Mont Blanc, to a finish line where Haute-Savoie meets Switzerland. Although short car rides will connect some dots, the trek will unspool mostly on snow.

And we're not in Keystone anymore. Up high, we'll encounter an unholy congress of ice and rock, with zero trees to aid navigation in frequent fogs. The 360-degree aspects found at most Euro resorts will mean sun-affected, often unstable snowpacks. (During 2005-06, avalanches killed 57 people in the French Alps alone.) This is why IFMGA pros—who know the difference between hoarfrost and its psycho-killer cousin, windslab, not to mention wilderness-first-aid training and a few dialects—are the only people legally qualified to guide on Europe's glaciers.

But professional guides have flaws. Like charging a fee. And nagging. And not, uh, cherishing the moment. Better to spend resources on France's Institut Géographique National maps, which don't mooch for tips. The only mountain expert we're looking to is Aspen's late Hunter S. Thompson, who gave us our motto, Quand les choses … Or, as he put it, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."