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The Beaufortain, a Tyrolean island

The Alps have their great valleys, open to great traffic, great invasions, great commerce and great nuisances..

And then there are our little valleys, which have long remained mountain islands. The Beaufortain is one of them.

An island is a rather special culture, but it doesn't have to be an inward-looking one. At sea, islands have their sailors. On land, they also have their adventurers, going off to see what it's like further afield, or if there's not a bit more to eat than in the field of their birth...

By dint of patience and hard work, the Beaufortains have shaped their mountains according to the needs of a complex agro-pastoral system, where no plot of land is lost for the sake of it. From the cereals grown in the flat lands below to the last gaps in the mountain pastures, no plot of land was left unexploited at the beginning of the 19th century. The result was an open landscape dotted with scattered chalets, barns or "remues" where people spent a few weeks taking their cattle up to the mountain pastures to graze on the fresh hay as the snow gave up. Comparisons with the Tyrol are sometimes made here. This is true enough for the landscapes and the care taken to maintain the agricultural heritage. And it's also true in terms of the psychology of the local people. In fact, if there are bulbous bell towers in Beaufortain, as in many other Savoyard valleys, it's because there were once influences from the east...

From summer to winter

For a mountain farmer, winter is almost a waste of time, a heavy burden on summer work, when many hands have to be mobilised to gather the hay and provisions essential to the survival of men and animals during this downtime. A lot of hands in summer, too many in winter. So as not to be a burden on the family granary, many left far away to sell their labour (the cliché of the young chimney sweeps...), or to become travelling salesmen, haberdashers or even jewellers... Some never returned, founding families in Paris or elsewhere (this is how the most famous Beaufortain, Roger Frison Roche, was born in Paris...). Others came back with new ideas, such as welcoming tourists. Alas, the Beaufortain has no 4,000 or even 3,000 climbs with formidable cliffs. The mountaineering craze first hit Chamonix, then Pralognan and La Grave. The Beaufortain, with its cow mountains (even if the Pierra Menta scares even the chamois), was in the doldrums. So here we welcomed a handful of tourists who had come to enjoy the green while listening to the cowbells.

Until one day, when a few enlightened people showed off by skiing down the meadows in the middle of winter. It was the dawn of a revolution: if people were prepared to pay to come and enjoy themselves during the off-season for agriculture, they might avoid having to travel far to find a crust... In 1927, the Hôtel Viallet in Arêches was the first to open in winter. People from Lyon came to enjoy the snowy pastures of the Grand Mont... Others opened accommodation in Les Pémonts, above Hauteluce. Alfred Couttet, a native of Chamonix, built a hotel in the superb Roselend basin around 1937. Ski lifts were even planned...

At the same time, the Albertville region was shedding its military-trading town garb to embolden itself with factory chimneys. Following in the footsteps of Aristide Bergès of Isère (white coal), industrialists came to harness the energy of the Beaufort torrents to power their fireworks down below. Aubry in Venthon, and above all Paul Girod in Ugine, built power stations one by one to harness the Beaufort Doron. All of these worksites brought work to the valley, stirred up the population and soon brought a few royalties to the communes.

Winter ahead

The war was less dramatic here than in the Vercors or the Glières, even though the valley was a solid base for the maquis, with the great parachute drop of August 1944 at Les Saisies. [1]After the liberation, a few open-minded people put into practice what they had seen elsewhere, from the instructors in Megève to the cable cars in the dams... Why not set up a ski lift here? In 1947, Gaspard Blanc (with the help of his wife Simone) opened the first ski lift in Arêches.

The following year, the fate of the future Roselend station was sealed: the fledgling EDF was interested in the basin and the 1200 m drop to La Bâthie, near Albertville. In ten years, the balance of the Beaufortain was turned upside down. Three huge construction sites invaded the mountain pastures: the Roselend, Saint Guérin and Gittaz dams. Thousands of outside workers arrived, while local youngsters tried their hand at the good salaries on the building sites... It was certainly hard work, but what about making hay by hand on the devil's slopes? Many did not return to farming, or did so as a double occupation. Because from down below, columns of buses went up night and day to take the workers to the Ugine steelworks. With 4,000 jobs at the end of the 60s, the steel industry had a wide reach.

In winter, the small resort of Arêches developed slowly, with local competition from Les Saisies, which opened in 1963 after the pioneering period of an Austrian, Erwin Eckl, who had come to the promising mountain pastures on the pass before the war.

When the work was finished, Beaufort was suddenly threatened with starvation. Its lifeblood was leaving. Traditional agriculture was devastated, and tourism was not yet able to limit the damage.

The salvific reaction will advance on two feet, and with the comfortable crutch of the taxes paid by EDF in compensation for the drowned mountain pastures.

Around Maxime Viallet, a group of farmers revived the local cheese, obtaining an AOC for Beaufort in the late 60s. Slowly, they succeeded in creating an exceptional product, sold at a good price. It was the only way to offset the extra costs of farming the steep meadows of the massif.

The commune of Beaufort took over the old ski lifts that had been pushed to hell in the meadows of Arêches, and gradually organised a coherent resort capable of attracting holidaymakers. The only authorised developers were those involved in social tourism. The rest of the property development was virtually monopolised by the locals. The island is happy to accept visitors, but it keeps the profits locally, and manages without too much deviation to maintain the image of pristine, natural mountains that it has managed to export. Yet the Beaufortain region has 20,000 tourist beds for just 4,000 permanent residents...

Yesterday, or the day before, no one would have dreamt of reaching such accommodation capacities. But because it has been achieved so smoothly, by relying on traditional but revitalised agriculture, the Beaufortain's transformation is almost a model. While other Alpine valleys are overrun with thorns, the problem is virtually unknown in the Beaufortain, much to the delight of mountain bikers using both traditional trails and new farm tracks.

François Rieu

[1] Read Les Montagnards de la nuit (The Night Mountainmen) by Frison Roche