Help I'm Down Here !

Enjoying the mountain solitude, the snowshoer kept a steady pace. Then the snow gave way beneath him.

- Lisa Fitterman

FRIDAY, MAY 20. Yannick Niez tosses his much-used snowshoes and daypack into his car. It is nearing 10am on a sunny morning last year in Poey-d’Oloron, a farming village near the border with Spain. In the distance, the peak of La Pierre Saint-Martin in the French Pyrenees looks like a painting in gentle shades of grey, green and white. But Yannick knows that the 2,504-meter mountain is mercurial, its conditions changing with a shift in the wind.

This morning, though, is cloudless and with a day off from his factory job making airplane landing systems, Yannick wants to take advantage of the snow before it melts in the late spring warmth.

He pulls away from his parents’ small stone farmhouse and starts the 50-kilometer drive. He’s so focused on getting to the mountain, with no one answer to and no schedule to meet, that he doesn’t think to leave them a note about his plans for the day.

Tall, with dark hair, jug ears and a serious mien, at 42 Yannick is a divorced father who has been living at his parents’ for the last two years. He misses his son, seven-year-old Yaël, but he likes being on his own. Sometimes he even prefers it. At a rock concert or a movie or on an outing like today, he likes that he can lose himself, just be carried along.

How often he has come this way! First as a child when he was taken by his father, then as a teenager who’d rather be outside than in class, and now, looking forward to one day bringing his own little boy here too.

Yannick slows to negotiate the switchbacks that snake up the mountain, higher and higher. The forest thins until it disappears altogether, giving way to an expanse of snow, scrabble and scrub. Finally, at around 1,650 meters, he stops and parks. His is the only car in the area.