Cresta d’Arp to Punta Helbronner: The Ground Click on the Mountain Actually Used

A photography contest with no set course is a contest about ground. Click on the Mountain gave each team a photographer, riders, an alpine guide on the years its rosters name one, and three shooting days, then withheld what a competition normally supplies: a route. The teams had a menu of sectors instead, and it grew over ten editions from a lift-served bowl above the village to a glacier arrival at 3,466 m — documented, dated, and limited in one place by what the cableways were doing.

The bowl the contest started in

The first editions worked the lift-served area. The contest's own 2015 dispatch puts the opening shooting day in the Courmayeur Mont Blanc Funivie sector, in cloud, naming no glacier, helicopter or cableway.

The aspect line is the operative one for a camera. Ultimate-Ski sets the flanks out as opposites — Chécrouit "is North East facing and gets the morning rays", Pré de Pascal and Val Veny "North West facing and warms up in the afternoon" — so one ridge hands a photographer two light situations several hours apart, one lift ride apart. Val Veny is also the tree-covered flank, and the one that holds the afternoon light. Figures of this kind are less stable than they look: the Regione gives Cresta d'Arp as 2,755 m, Ultimate-Ski 2,763 m.

Wind decides, and it decides upward

The contest's record contains one clean demonstration of how this terrain fails. On the second shooting day of the seventh edition, in March 2015, strong wind closed the upper lifts and every team was pushed down into the woods on the Val Veny side; the German ski magazine skiing.de, reporting from Courmayeur on 8 March 2015, described the wind forcing participants below the treeline because the upper area had to be closed. The high ground is reached by the tramways and cable cars that stop first when it blows, while the trees at the bottom of the same ridge keep working. The contest's 2018 pages record wind, snow and rising temperatures as conditions the alpine guides had to read, and credit such decisions to the guides rather than the schedule.

What 2012 opened up

The organisers' press release of 22 March 2012, five days before the fourth edition began, widened the declared shooting ground for that edition to take in Val Ferret and the Chécrouit–Val Veny sector, terrain the release characterises as less difficult and more scenic. On the Vallée Blanche the release is worth reading closely, because it is easy to count it as a third addition. It is not one: the release lists it as the leading ground of the Monte Bianco freeride area the contest was already working, so what 2012 opened was Val Ferret and Chécrouit–Val Veny, extending a set the Vallée Blanche was already at the centre of. It is the archive's earliest dated statement of the organisers choosing the ground.

Past the terrace the terrain changes category, and the institutions say so in their own terms. The Regione Autonoma Valle d'Aosta's entry for the ski area states that off-piste routes in the upper part require individual safety equipment and the assistance of an alpine guide. The Società delle Guide Alpine di Courmayeur gives the Vallée Blanche as 18 km from the Torino hut at 3,375 m to Chamonix at 1,042 m through granite spires, crevasses and seracs, opening with a briefing on skiing fresh snow and recognising dangerous crevasses, and listing harness, helmet and transceiver as the kit the guide supplies. That is equipped, guided glacier terrain in the guides' own account, and a camera does not alter it. Even the top station's altitude is unsettled: 3,466 m from the Regione and italia.it, 3,462 m from Ultimate-Ski.

The terrace that was not there

The German freeride magazine bergstolz.de previewed the sixth edition — 25 February to 1 March 2014 — on 18 February, a week before it began, setting out three shooting days: one in each of Courmayeur's two ski areas, naming Cresta d'Arp and Punta Helbronner, and one in the backcountry with a helicopter drop. It announces a plan, not what happened.

And in that winter the terrace at Punta Helbronner could not be reached. The Italian-language encyclopaedic record of the Funivia dei Ghiacciai has the La Palud–Pavillon–Rifugio Torino sections open to the public since 1948, and the top section from Rifugio Torino to Punta Helbronner running until April 2012, when the works began. Fondazione Montagna Sicura's notice of that closure and the Aosta Valley daily Aostasera record what stayed open: from 10 April 2012 the cableways ran regularly as far as the Rifugio Torino station. Skyway Monte Bianco opened on 30 May 2015, after four years of work.

What 2013 and 2014 lost was the terrace at 3,466 m, not the ground below it. The Torino hut at 3,375 m — where the guides' own Vallée Blanche description starts the descent — was served throughout, so the Vallée Blanche named in the 2012 press release stayed reachable in the editions that followed. How a 2014 team reached Punta Helbronner itself, or whether bergstolz.de used the name loosely for the Monte Bianco sector as a whole, the archive does not say. Firmer for those years is skiing.de's mid-event report of 28 February 2013: a day on Monte Bianco under guides of the Società delle Guide Alpine di Courmayeur, and a helicopter day starting at 7.45 in the morning at the Helops hangar outside Courmayeur, landing zones drawn between the teams first.

Skyway reached the contest's own schedule late. The installation opened on 30 May 2015, but the 2015 and 2016 programme pages do not name it at all — the 2016 page marks its Thursday free shooting and heliski and stops there. The name first appears in 2017, and the archived programme pages for 2017 and 2018 then carry the same asterisk: heliski and the Skyway ascent of Monte Bianco to be scheduled according to the weather. In 2017 it stands against three shooting days. How many it stands against in 2018 the archive does not settle: the 2018 programme contradicts itself, marking Friday 9 March as free shooting as well as media day and editing day, while the same page's free-shooting block lists Tuesday to Thursday only and its awards entry still speaks of three days of shooting. The contest's roots page, archived in 2017, names Courmayeur Mont Blanc Funivie, Skyway Mont Blanc and the helicopter as the ways to the ground with no weather condition attached.

Thirty minutes of flight time

Heliski was added for the fifth edition, in 2013, presented in the organisers' announcement that year as the way to reach untouched ground quickly. From 2015 the archive is specific: on the opening evening the heli spots were drawn by lot in front of the audience, from four classic itineraries of the Monte Bianco area — Aiguille de l'Aigle, Col des Pyramides, Lex Blanche and Mont Fortin — and each team had 30 minutes of flight time. The contest's own page credits the flying to GMH Helicopter Services; skiing.de's report that week names Courmayeur Heliski, and records the local guides drawn to their teams the same evening.

The legal frame around those thirty minutes explains the guide sitting in every team photograph. Valle d'Aosta's regional law of 4 March 1988, no. 15, on alpine flight for the protection of the environment, prohibits landing and take-off above 1,500 m across most of the region, lists authorised sectors in an annex, and makes skier transport a matter of conventions between the competent municipality and the operator. Article 3 requires those conventions to provide flight itineraries agreed with the forestry station and the Unione Valdostana Guide, radio contact with each group during the descent, and — the clause that matters most here — an alpine guide, or a ski instructor in zones without alpine difficulty, for every seven skiers or fraction thereof. The same article confines skier transport to the hours between 07.00 and 16.00 and makes high-altitude landing sites ordinarily usable only from 20 December to 15 May, with short derogations open to the Giunta regionale: a statutory season with March in the middle of it.

Those hours are a light budget rather than a bureaucratic detail: the heli day is bounded at both ends by statute, and the good hour on a north-facing drop zone sits inside it.

Val Ferret, and a watched glacier

Val Ferret entered the announced set in 2012 and is the one sector that is not primarily a lift or a helicopter problem: a valley floor with a road along it, whose winter character is set by what hangs above it.

Fondazione Montagna Sicura, the non-profit based in Courmayeur, publishes its scientific reports and alerting procedures for the Planpincieux glacier under the heading "Val Ferret, Courmayeur", and in 2019 issued daily bulletins on it using data from the CNR's institute for hydrogeological protection. The same foundation coordinates the observer network behind the regional snow and avalanche bulletin, which the Aosta Valley civil protection department issues for four massifs, Monte Bianco among them. Its danger scale, published by the European Avalanche Warning Services and carried in Italy by AINEVA, is five levels wide, and at level 3 triggering is possible from low additional loads on the steep slopes it identifies. The bulletin names those aspects and altitudes; a photograph does not.

What the record does not say

Against all of this, the archive's silences are large. From 2016 the schedule pages stop naming sectors and describe the ground only at the scale of the massif and the resort. No archived page names the sector a given team worked on a given day, in any edition, except in the 2015 dispatches, and where a winning book was made is recorded nowhere read for this piece.

One further sector deserves naming because the contest named it: the village. The 2016 programme put a public street session at 17.00 on the Thursday, and street was one of the six awards handed out from 2016 to 2018. The ground this contest used does not end at the treeline. It ends in Courmayeur's streets, at the end of an afternoon, in front of an audience.