LATER THAT NIGHT, we push our faces into gooey raclettes. Kilograms of cheese still clog our intestines as we check in to the swank, four-star Hotel Fitz Roy, in Val Thorens. Compared with the spoiled brats of British families and the preening French trophy wives, we're sadly underdressed. But the Fitz Roy treats us to pre-dinner champagne and cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto. This gives us a nice, luxurious feeling that compels me to buy a $180 bottle of wine that Outside will later refuse to cover.

Val Thorens is part of the megaresort called Les Trois Vallées, one of the biggest linked ski areas on the planet. Along with nearly 400 miles of groomed pistes, there are 184 cable cars, gondolas, and chairlifts. Stringing lifts up every conceivable ridge is France's version of Manifest Destiny. Without this, ambitious inter­connects like ours would be impossible. It takes us two days to cross the vast Trois Vallées: one with the Belgian snowboarders on the electric descent down Peclet, another through Méribel and Courchevel, where we see topless girls sunbathing on midslope rocks. At the bottom of Courchevel, the 184 lifts finally stop. This is an outrage. We're forced to call a cab, which wants airfare money ($135!) to drive us 30 minutes to Champagny-en-Vanoise, where a tram connects to La Plagne ski area. "La Plagne," explains a Frenchwoman with an impossibly alluring accent, "means ‘The Place Where the Cows Go in the Summer.'" La Plagne is gigantic, spanning 24,700 acres and holding 50,000 beds. It's two days after Easter, and the place is mobbed. The French hardly require something as momentous as Jesus' resurrection to head to the hills. They'll vacation if an earthworm grows its head back.

A disturbing number of them are sporting très passé purple-and-pink one-pieces, and three time travelers from 1992 board a quad lift with me. As is the habit of Euro skiers, they pull down the restraining bar without consulting me. The bar comes only halfway down, stopped by my pack. They fruitlessly yank it again. And again. "Je regrette," I apologize, insincerely. They glare back and accept the situation only when they see how pointy my ice ax and crampons are.

The Place Where the Cows Go in the Summer is where the ski mountaineers go in spring. From La Plagne's high point, we head toward a legendary 11,211-foot monster called Bellecôte. A series of uninterrupted 5,000-plus-foot descents spill down it, with incredible coffin-width couloirs and concave pitches. We spend 45 minutes skinning up the back side, then downclimb 200 feet of snow-coated rock poised above a void. Descending is an agonizing, one-limb-at-a-time ordeal: With crampons attached, we put an ice ax in one hand and a self-arrest pole in the other. Punch ice ax into wall, stretch leg down, kick till crampon bites, punch arrest pole, kick other leg. Try to keep the skis on your back from knocking an overhang. Try to trust the half-buried, UV-cooked fixed rope, the only thing keeping you from painting the rocks below with internal organs. The skiing should be the easy part. But first come fangs of rock and 600 feet of 45-degree steeps. Scratchy little hesitations—what skiers call survival turns—deliver us to a sun- softened apron. We let off the brakes and rip ginormous corn turns, floating our fat skis through water molecules, surfing as much as skiing.