French Alps

To run the UTMB is to walk a full circle around Mont-Blanc, crossing three borders between the start and a finish that lands you back where you began, in Chamonix. The ground lies to you kindly: the first 30 kilometres are generous, and that is exactly where the newcomer spends the legs he will beg for later, on the four cols above 2,400 metres, deep in the second night without sleep. Between one col and the next, the single-track past the Bertone and Bonatti refuges — the Italian face of the massif falling away to your left — is among the most beautiful stretches this sport has to offer. More than a third of the field never reaches the arch. That is the bargain: the most photographed scenery in trail running, and a price paid in full.

Val Thorens makes no apology for what it is: concrete at 2,300 metres, no forest, no village charm — and that is exactly why it holds when the rest of the Alps is still praying for snow. Altitude is the whole argument. You ski an amphitheatre of glacial cirques above the treeline, wide pistes running clean off the Cime Caron, with a base that usually lasts into May. This is ground for those who want volume and long cruising kilometres, not for anyone hunting the secret black couloir — the resort lives on its blues and reds, and on the link that opens 600 km on a single pass. Come knowing two things: the wind up top can shut the high ground in a heartbeat, and the après-ski here is not for the faint of heart.