OUR FINAL DAY finds us in Avoriaz, a collection of apartment blocks perched on the edge of a cliff. We grab an espresso and fries at an outdoor café as we switch out of well-used trail runners and into even riper ski boots. We're now within Portes du Soleil, the globe's largest international ski area, which straddles the Switzerland-France border not far from Geneva.

The border is our finish line, and our route to it is all in-bounds groomers. The last chairlift reminds me of all the others in France: skimpy. I never lose the sensation that my large New World ass is about to topple off. Crossing the 7,469-foot Pointe de Mossette, we hoot halfheartedly and raise our poles in triumph. We've crossed Savoy. There are no ticker-tape parades, no kisses from swell gals—just the satisfaction of finishing a quest that involved 59 trams, gondolas, chairs, and drag-lifts and thousands upon thousands of vertical feet.

The beer in Champéry, our final stop, is cold and big and worthy. As I hoist one, my mind goes back to Peclet, with the static electricity and the Belgian snowboarders and the joint—which, like most in Europe, contained mostly tobacco and did nothing but induce a cough.

With the sky short-circuiting all around us, our hair standing utterly on end, what exactly would a guide have done? One might hope that, at $400 a day, he'd have raised his ice ax high and acted as a lighting rod. But more likely he'd have anticipated the quickly closing storm and refused to attempt Peclet in the first place.

That would have been a bummer. Peclet's west face is a 3,000-vertical-foot test piece guarded by seracs and riddled with crevasses. Authorities recommend crampons, a 30-meter rope, and to "avoid falling at all costs." We inched around rock and onto a sketchy 45-degree face. Jammed our ice axes into the snowpack till steady. Anchored backpacks by looping straps over the ax heads. Hoped to hell our toeholds, on rime-crusted schist, were secure as we gingerly extracted our skis and lay them across the exposed fall line. Stabbed, with dental precision, boots into bindings. Slowly sheathed the ax and shouldered the pack, sensing how badly gravity wanted to suck gear and flesh down its maw. Exhaled nervously. Contemplated the dreary, foggy light below.

A pang of vertigo struck, then weirdness. The Belgian snowboarders, on a ridge above us, were trying to coax the sun out by singing. "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …" Between us, Lee, Beej, Lance and I carried avalanche transceivers, cell phones, binoculars, ice screws, belay devices, headlamps, climbing skins, knives, and, if I'm not mistaken, some equine painkillers. We were ready for most anything. Except Belgian stoners atop a French peak crooning Louisiana's Depression-era state song.

We were happy just to be traversing Savoy on our own power. Doing so removed our amateur status. When the going got weird, the weird turned pro.