Pitch-black skiing on the Sarenne run in Alpe d’Huez, France

Alpe d’Huez, in the southern French Alps, is home to Sarenne, Europe’s longest black skiing run.

A panorama of Alpe d’Huez in winter. Laurent Salino / Alpe d’Huez Tourisme

For many skiers, starting at the top of their favourite piste and not stopping until they reach the bottom is a badge of honour. But there's one run in the French Alps I defy anyone to ski hard non-stop – the infamous Sarenne in Alpe d'Huez.

It’s not that the Sarenne is especially steep or challenging, although it does tout itself as a black run; it’s just long – very long. Starting at the lofty 3,330-metre summit of Pic Blanc (where you really need to take time out to enjoy some of the finest mountain panoramas in the Alps before you hit the piste), the Sarenne winds down the eponymous glacier in its upper reaches, before swooping onto steep slopes above the Gorges de Sarenne, after which it eases off with a gentle schuss along the bottom of the gorge to finally peter out at the base of the Alpauris chairlift.

By the time you get to the bottom, you’ll have descended 2,200 metres, over a distance of 16 kilometres. Even Bode Miller would struggle to do that without a breather.

When four of us take on the Sarenne in bright spring sunshine, I’ve no idea how long it takes to wend our way down from Pic Blanc – to be honest, I don’t care, for while the bunch of German guys who shoot past us are clearly out to break some personal records, this, for me, is the kind of piste that should be savoured.

It’s worth taking your time to enjoy the excitingly steep but perfectly groomed slopes of the upper reaches, cool breezes lifting off the glacier, before you hit open alpine terrain and maybe take your first real breather. If you do, you may be lucky enough, as we are, to see chamois scampering across the slopes – one of our group, Vicky, is so taken with by these graceful mountain residents that she can’t stop grinning once we set off again.

The Sarenne’s lower slopes do, however, bring into question its claim to be the longest black run in the world. There’s no doubt that the slopes at the top are challenging enough to be on the very dark side, although not beyond any decent intermediate skier – but once you hit the Gorges de Sarenne, the pitch is so gently angled that it would struggle to justify being rated “green”, let alone black; Vicky is on a snowboard and has to be given regular pushes and pulls from the skiers in our party to keep up her speed.

But the fact that you’re not hooning along at high speed gives you the chance to take in the wooded glades and listen to songbirds twittering in the trees and mountain streams gurgling their way downhill; and it’s good to be able to “warm down” your quads after the battering they get on the upper slopes of the Sarenne.

And whether the Sarenne is or isn’t a “real” black is beside the point, because descending it is still one of the French Alps’ great ski experiences. However, like the majority of the slopes in Alpe d’Huez, the Sarenne faces south/south-west, and consequently can suffer from exposure to the sun (the resort is also located towards the southern end of the Alps, which doesn’t help either).

Consequently, this winter it will be sporting 72 new snow cannon, at a cost of €8 million (Dh36.8m), with the aim of opening the run by mid-December every year and keeping it open until the very end of the season (usually late April).

There are also six webcams along the course of the descent, so you can see what real-time snow conditions are like before you take it on; and just in case you can’t get enough of the 2,200-metre “vertical” in the daytime, you can also ski it at night.

The snow cannon have been equipped with LED lights to create what is now called, in flowery French, a “slope of stars”. By taking the last cable car up to Pic Blanc, you can join the resort’s ski instructors and ski patrollers for a night-time descent, after watching the sunset from Pic Blanc’s summit.

Yet the thing that strikes the four keen skiers and boarders in our group as much as the Sarenne is the massive amount of off-piste skiing available in the resort. As my friend and fellow ski writer James Cove says: “I’m amazed at the off-piste potential here – everywhere you look there’s terrain that’s just begging to be skied”.

The “Alpe d’Huez grand domaine ski”, as the entire ski area is known, is actually made up of a number of independent villages, in addition to Alpe d’Huez. Villard Reculas, Oz en Oisans, Auris en Oisans and Vaujany can all be easily accessed on groomed pistes from the centre of Alpe d’Huez; most can be accessed off-piste, too. The smallest settlement, Villard Reculas, is perhaps the prettiest (so much so that Vicky decides “I want to live here” within five minutes of skiing down to it).

It’s a traditional alpine village with magnificent views of the Romanche Valley, from which rises the famous D211 road and the 21 hairpin bends that the Tour de France regularly scales in July. Villard Reculas just happened to be sited close to the slopes when Alpe d’Huez was developed in the 1960s and 70s (although the Poma company installed its first-ever ski lift in Alpes d’Huez in 1936), but the larger village of Auris en Oisans, way over at the other end of the ski area, is where things are really happening in the next few years.

Or to be precise, the 2,175-metre peak of Signal de l’Homme above the village is where it’s all happening. The resort lift company’s commercial director Christian Marie tells me: “Within five years the Signal de l’Homme will have another ski lift on its summit; it will be the start point for an 8.8km long ‘Peak to Peak’ lift that will link with the resort of Les Deux Alpes”. He points to a hazy conglomeration of buildings and ski lifts way off to the south.

The Signal de l’Homme already has a rich history – its name comes from the fact that French Resistance fighters used it as a point from which to signal to their fellow maquisards during the Second World War. This remarkable new development will also be a historic event in the history of French skiing, as linking with Les Deux Alpes will make up one of the biggest linked ski areas on the planet.

But don’t wait until the new lift goes in to visit. Alpe d’Huez is still one of the Alps’ most iconic ski resorts. It’s not the prettiest by any means; if you want traditional “chocolate box” tweeness, you’re in the wrong place.

But, personally, I find something appealing about the rather brutalist 1970s French ski-resort architecture that makes up the heart of the resort. It has almost become a classic of alpine style as it ages, with the concrete and glass structures (essentially built to allow ordinary French families to enjoy a ski holiday) having a very French insouciance about them. “We are what we are,” they say, with a Gallic shrug.

That said, Alpe d’Huez’s newer hotels, such as the four-star Chamois d’Or, in which we stay, have been built in more traditional style, resulting in a slightly bizarre mix of old modernist and modern traditional styles – it must all be very confusing if you’re an architecture buff.

If you’re simply here to ski, though – and why else would you visit? – once you’re up on the mountains, the resort architecture is the last thing you’ll be looking at. Majestic mountain panoramas draw your eye as you ride the lifts and ski the slopes, twisted and contorted by aeons of geological forces, and Alpe d’Huez and its neighbouring villages are lost in all this scenic drama.

It’s nice to know that the mountains always win.

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