2 Alpes Via Ferrata Review

The Arsine route is just on the Briançon side of the village of La Grave which sits on the main D1089 between Les 2 Alpes and Serre Chevalier on the other side of the Col du Lautaret (see map). La Grave is probably best known for its unique off piste ski area served by an increasingly antiquated telecabin and ranging in difficulty from "really not too hard at all" to "are you mad? I wouldn't do that if my life depended on it".

The telecabin is closed at the moment and won't open until winter gets under way (lift opening dates), but the glaciers at the top were clearly visible from the road, and boasting a fair bit of new snow after the weekend's bad weather, from the looks of it. La Grave is linked to Les 2 Alpes in winter via a snowcat, and your 6 day pass includes unlimited skiing over there (lift pass prices), but the link won't open until the snowpack at glacier level is stable enough to support both skiers and their transport, so early snowfall up there is a promising sign.

After La Grave a right turn off the main road takes you past a little campsite (summer only and a superb sunny spot by the river) and down to a large parking area at the bottom of aforementioned scary cliff.

Like Cascades at Alpe du Grande Serre (see last week's report), Arsine is graded PD or peu difficile, but Pascal's handy guidebook warns that it is "unsuitable for people not accustomed to the void". Essentially what this means is that most of the climb is on a vertical wall above a Sonic the Hedgehog style abyss, the main difference between this and a Sega game being that if you get it seriously wrong here you go straight to the GAME OVER screen, do not pass go, do not just pop up again with one of the many spare hedgehogs you notched up earlier on.

After the weekend's dreary weather the sun decided to be nice to us again this week, but seeing that the route was largely north facing and in shade I opted for trousers, a good move because as soon as you get out of direct sunshine or into the wind it starts to get chilly. Come on, this is October after all - whatever climbing we get is a bit of a bonus at this end of the year.

Given the combination of north facing and a rainy weekend, we did wonder if the route would be nastily wet and slippery, but while there were damp parts, most of it had dried out nicely and there wasn't any significant risk of slipping off the footholds - always reassuring when you're 30 metres up with nothing but abyss underneath.

Looking at the route initially I wondered if Pascal had lost his marbles in grading it PD and suitable for beginners, but if we ignore the abject terror induced by the empty space beneath your feet, on a technical level the climb isn't all that difficult, with plenty of bars and often a choice of several hand and foot holds, both on the rock and off it. There's also a handy escape path or "echappatoire" after the first part of the route, though it has to be said that if you've got that far without gibbering with fear you might as well carry on because you're over the worst of it.

The walk back down to the car park is steep but easy enough, with impressive views up towards the col (mountain pass) and across the valley to some of La Grave's outlying villages and the plateau d'Emparis above. Look out for the Cascade de La Pisse on the right hand side of the road back towards Les 2 Alpes, where it falls vertically from the plateau above straight into the valley. I'm told there's a new via ferrata here following the line of the waterfall and, like Arsine, heavily equipped with bars and handholds. But you're going to have to be extremely well accustomed to the void for that one, because it's vertical and exposed all the way from the valley floor to the plateau. Not one to be doing in a high wind...