"TIME TO TAKE THE PIG for a walk," Lance grunts, shouldering his porcine backpack. Our packs are so overstuffed, weighing 40 to 45 pounds each, that we had to ride in the baggage compartment on the train from Geneva to Grenoble. It's day one, in Les Deux Alpes, our jumping-off point. L2A boasts all the bona fides of a French mega­resort: thigh-meltingly big vertical (6,350 feet), stunningly tan and pretty brunettes, and cafeteria meat that looks like chicken yet is in fact rabbit. We hike 20 minutes over the Savoie border and into La Grave—or, as the paranoid North Americans who felt they discovered the place in the early nineties once called it, Vallée X, home to Europe's steepest, scariest slopes. With no village, disco, or ski patrol, it remains a cow-dung-scented burg with 7,000 vertical feet of mostly ungroomed, no-beginners terrain. Unfortunately, shade reaches La Grave hours before we do. Forgiving spring slush has flash-frozen into brittle coral. Skiing it turns our teeth into castanets.

But we're accustomed to mountaineering's drags. I've done all kinds of expeditions with my old friend Lee Cohen, our 50-year-old photographer, who's been blitzing the steeps at Alta, Utah, for 30 years. Utah native B.J. "Beej" Brewer, 30, won the 2001 national telemark championship and is sponsored by Rossignol; he and I skied the Swiss Alps two years ago, and he'll prove to be Lee's favorite subject. And Lance McDonald, 45, works a nine-to-five job for the town government of Telluride, Colorado (where I live), but still nails big peaks aplenty, including a pioneering descent on Alaska's University Peak in 2001.

What snow La Grave does have ends well short of the valley floor, and the last 90 minutes finds us sliding down a muddy service road. One slip sends me Rickey Hendersoning 30 feet down tractionless chocolate milkshake.

The next day we catch a pre-dawn ride with our chalet keeper to Valfroide, a summer shepherd village that's bereft of life. No lifts rise from Valfroide, only the Alps. Climbing skins and crampons will propel us across a vast, rarely skied expanse and up, up, up to the 10,620-foot Aiguille d'Argentière.

Since the monstrosity of the peaks shields the rising sun, we move quickly at first over icy, nearly frictionless hardpack. After a lunch of baguette and chocolate, though, things get scary. We're alone, preparing to climb hairy-steep boilerplate. We snap ski crampons onto our bindings for extra bite, but it's extremely dicey. In some spots the surface is uneven; should the metal teeth of the crampon mistakenly bite air, there follows a sickening jerk downward.

After nine hours and 4,470 beastly feet of climbing, we finally reach the summit, wiggle into harnesses, and don helmets. The couloir splitting Argentière's northeast face begins with a near-vertical chunk of mixed rock and snow; we'll need to rappel in.

Hanging on the rope like a worm on a fishhook, I realize eight years have passed since I last did this. I'm the least experienced mountaineer on the trip. Which is kind of a good thing, like being the lousiest house in an upscale neighborhood: The others' property values lift mine. With the capable Beej, Lance, and Lee around, I never want for a guide.

A porter, on the other hand, wouldn't suck. Argentière is coated with perfect, fluffy snow, the kind backcountry addicts like us crave. But as we ski down, our behemoth packs blaspheme the glory of the powder, pushing our heads into recurring faceplants.