On skis in the snow and with tanks under a frozen lake
Ice diving at 1,300 metres in the French Alps, in Courchevel. Twenty minutes of diving underwater without ropes to discover how far you can push your body and mind.
The rendezvous is at 10 a.m., at the edge of the forest, in Courchevel Le Praz, near the arrival of the ski slopes. There is a plateau that opens out in front of the alpine village, at this time all white. Snow and ice. In the background you can see the two ski jumps of the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics. In summer it is a lake where people go for a walk or for a swim under the spruce forest. Some people also come here to fish. Freshwater fish, if there are any at this altitude.
We are at 1,300 metres in the French Alps, behind the Aiguilles. The names of the peaks here, which can be seen after Mont Blanc if you look towards France, are Aiguille de Chanrossa (3,045 metres), Aiguille de Péclet (3,561 metres), Aiguille du Fruit (3,051 metres). Rocks that pierce the sky, natural spires from which the Les 3 Vallées ski area opens up: Courchevel, Méribel, Val Thorens. "The 'skiing capital of the world', as they call it, has 550 kilometres of slopes: a huge white basin stretching along the three valleys, full of sun and snow for most of the season, thanks to the high altitude and the protection of the surrounding mountains, the spires.
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The sun has not yet risen over the frozen lake, which remains in shadow. It is cold, the mobile phone reads three degrees. Le Praz, the alpine lake that stretches across the plateau, is 40 metres deep at its deepest point and now appears to me as a sheet of ice. On one bank, I find the Courchevel Aventure meeting point where I will prepare for what will be my first ice diving experience, an underwater dive in the frozen lake: it is a small 3-4 metre wooden hut near the path leading to the slopes. Inside, there is movement. A young man with a well-trained physique, a handlebar moustache and goatee, a shaved red hair-tail, a French beret lowered to a comma on his head and an infectious smile, tinkers with oxygen tanks, breathing apparatus and Gavs, the inflatable buoyancy regulating jackets. His name is Samuel Derycker, nicknamed by his friends Red wolf, the red wolf. Red because of his orange-red hair, wolf because, he says, he grew up in an alpine hut in the Auvergne, far from here. His school was the mountains. Now he is a diving instructor, but at altitude. Next to him is a French couple, Christophe and his wife, who are here for the skiing week. They come from La Rochelle, Aquitaine, on the Atlantic Ocean: he is passionate about freediving and wanted to experience the thrill - never is this expression more apt - of diving into a frozen lake. It is also the first experience of this kind for him. We proceed one at a time accompanied by the other instructor, Richard Dottin, who in summer works as a diving master on the Côte d'Azur near Saint-Raphaël, while in winter he continues to dive, but not in the tropical seas of the South, but here, in the cold, in the Alps.
I have always loved diving. The sensation of flying that you get when you start going down with your tanks in the first 8-10 metres of depth. Like a parachutist hovering not in the air, but in the sea, with the sunlight passing in rays through the water and becoming less intense the deeper you go. The blue becomes deep blue.
I think I have done about seventy dives over the years, I haven't counted them for a long time. But this is the first time in a frozen lake, at high altitude. At sea, if you have any problem at all, with the proper precautions - decompression, pauses during ascent - you can get out without much difficulty, you have an escape route. Not here. Above my head I have a layer of ice some twenty centimetres thick, like a very hard crystal, impossible to break.
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