When the Mountain Decides It's Done With You: What a Bad Day in Portes du Soleil Taught Me About Mountain Planning

There's a before and after version of yourself that diverges when you go through a rough experience. The naive girl who assumed that everything was going to go to plan. The weather holds. The lifts run. You get home on time, tired in the best way, maybe with a bit of windburn. Shout out to my fair-skinned friends.

And then there's the woman who scrambles out of the other side with a bruised ego and serious muscle fatigue.

I've been skiing for a little over ten years without many serious complications. If a mountain didn't open due to weather, it was a bummer but an understandable one. Safety matters. I'd rather stay home with a hot chocolate staring into a computer screen than fall to my death on a poorly maintained gondola, get buried in an avalanche, or dangle on a frozen lift going nowhere. I listen to the precautions. I respect the mountain. It's been here longer than me and it doesn't take any shit.

What Went Wrong in Portes du Soleil

This is why I was completely caught off guard when things didn't go as planned in the Portes du Soleil ski region.

Let me be clear, I love Portes du Soleil. It's a massive ski region straddling France and Switzerland, home to 12 different ski areas, and one of the most fun places I've ever ridden. It's also affordable, generally has good weather, and the après is as good as it gets for the French-speaking part of the Alps. (I am just a huge fan of German-speaking après.)

On a good day, which is most days, it's unbeatable. Windless, sunny, the kind of place that helps you forget you have a real life somewhere. You could ski for a week and rarely repeat a run if you plan it right. Yes, there are bottlenecks (I'm looking at you, Tour and Proclou), but for the most part, getting around is a breeze.

Why Wind Changes Everything in a Multi-Country Ski Area

The problem comes with wind.

Twelve resorts means twelve different safety protocols and, crucially, twelve different risk appetites. Switzerland tends to shut things down early, before you even have a chance to make the trek across the border. Sensible. And worth understanding: if you ski down the Swiss side to the French side and can't get back up, you're looking at a three-hour hike in conditions that, during a storm, could be genuinely dangerous.

France (almost always) has other ideas. I see this in their very laissez-faire social media posts and opening things they really shouldn't.

Their attitude on the day in question was to keep everything open until they physically couldn't. Just without telling anyone. Save for a single sign at one lift in Châtel reading "Vente Forte" (heavy winds), which in the Alps is roughly as informative as a sign that says "mountains exist," there was no communication. No updates. No warnings.

Lesson one: In a multi-country ski area, always know which country's rules and resort policies apply to the lift you need most. They are not the same.

So I did what any reasonable person would do: I asked. I found a lift operator and said, hey, I'm a little worried about the storm this afternoon. Will this specific lift, the only one back to my car, stay open?

Yep. It'll stay open.

I asked another.

Same answer.

Trusting the people whose literal job it is to manage these lifts, I went exploring. Knowing the storm was due around 2pm, I headed back at 1pm only to find out that the lift had "been closed for hours and had no plans to reopen."

Great.

Lesson two: In uncertain weather, set a hard turnaround time and stick to it. Don't rely on real-time information from people who may not have it.

I took stock of my options:

• A €200 taxi to the other side

• Hope the weather improved (it wasn't going to)

• Hike up an hour with my snowboard in hand (not ideal, but doable, thanks biceps and glutes)

The Hike Nobody Planned (But Needed to Be Done)

I went with option three.

I have plenty of friends who do backcountry, splitboarding, ski touring, the whole shebang. I'd never really considered joining them. Why would I willingly spend an hour walking up a hill a lift can handle in four minutes? Seemed like a waste of perfectly good legs.

But here I was. And honestly? Eff it. Let's go.

Google Maps said roughly an hour. The mountain was emptying out. Lifts on the Châtel side were starting to close too, since it was clear the crowd was thinning as I climbed higher. A few others were making the same trek. My French isn't great, so it was less of a conversation and more of a shared, silent suffering: the universal language of people doing something they didn't plan to do.

By the time I was about 90% of the way up, the lift started to move. Stop. Move. Stop. Then, gradually, a few people floated past on a chair heading exactly where I needed to go. (Not many though. I'm guessing plenty remained trapped in Avoriaz.)

But I'd already made it this far.

After a few more breathless steps, I reached the top. And the descent? Completely mine. I was the only one going down while everyone else was still struggling up. It was, in all honesty, one of the best runs of the day.

Sadly, that wasn't the end of it. The storm hit properly on the way down, and it took two buses and another 30-minute walk before I was finally sitting in my car, soaked, tired, and definitely not smiling, but feeling accomplished.

What This Story Is Really About

You might be thinking: Samantha, you spent the day skiing in the Alps. Do you really want to complain about this to me?

Fair. But I think you're missing the point.

This isn't really a story about skiing. It's a story about what happens when a plan falls apart and what you do next. Because that moment exists in every trip, every project, every plan you've ever made. The lift closes. The flight gets cancelled. The weather turns. And you're suddenly standing at the bottom of a hill you didn't expect to climb, weighing options you didn't want to have.

Skiing just has a way of making that very literal.

Things go wrong. Lifts close. Storms come early. The people who are supposed to have answers sometimes don't. And none of that means you shouldn't go. It means you should go prepared: know your options, know the terrain, know that a great day can pivot into an unplanned misadventure with almost no warning.

The final lesson: Joy isn't only found in the plan going right. Sometimes it's found in the hike nobody wanted to do, the run you had entirely to yourself, and arriving at your car hours late, breathless, and weirdly okay with it.

And sometimes the unplanned adventure is the best part.

Also, my butt is going to be in perfect shape for the coming hiking season. So, I guess, thanks?