Experience

Film yourself skiing Le Tunnel

NIKON D3, AF VR Zoom 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED, à 160mm, f/10, 1/500, 250 ISO. Photo Pascal Tournaire

Le Tunnel, with its walls of moguls, breath-taking view and tunnel through the rock, is a legendary black run! This run, for experienced skiers only, is an experience worth capturing!

A ski run

with a difference

Le Tunnel starts at Pic Blanc at 3330m. This black run starts at the top of the ski lift with a first slope which will get you well and truly warmed up before you enter the famous tunnel that gives the run its name. The ski patrol cover the floor of the tunnel with snow and its gentle 3% slope means you can slide effortlessly though the narrow lit-up passageway.

In the Top 10

steepest runs in the world!

Emerging from the tunnel is a thrilling moment! A breathtaking view and a feeling of vertigo. You’re facing one of the steepest slopes in the Alps, with a gradient of 35 degrees (70%) on average. Stretching away before you is an impressive mogul field leading down to Lac Blanc, where a little chairlift is waiting to take you back to the top of the Pic Blanc cable car at 2700m. After a few minutes admiring the view (or mentally preparing yourself), it’s your turn – time to negotiate the first turn (phew, made it…) and take on the moguls… There you go, your first time skiing Le Tunnel! Take a moment to get your breath back… You did it? Well done! Now you can tell your friends, with evidence to prove it! 😉

“Preliminary work on the tunnel, entrusted to the company Vigne d’Oris-en-Rattier, started on 16 July 1964 on the Sarenne glacier. It was a prominent local figure, hotel owner Georges Raion, who came up with the revolutionary idea. Why not cut a 200m-long tunnel out of the mountain, at an altitude of 3000m, from one side to the other? Impossible, crazy… a tunnel like that would cause a rush of air that would propel skiers out and off the side of the mountain”, said his critics, who advocated creating a route on the ridges in the Herpie area. The debate grew fiercer until the matter was settled incontrovertibly by Émile Allais, a ski champion well-known in France as a pioneer in marking out and maintaining ski runs: “It will be a first, but you have to make a tunnel!” Now they just needed to decide the gradient. Once again, Georges Raion had the solution. With a quick calculation, he concluded that it should be 3%” (Source : Marion Frison, IsereMag)

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