Les Houches — French Alps

The quieter end of the Chamonix valley, where a century-old rack railway climbs toward the Bossons glacier and nobody's fighting you for a hotel room in August.

I’d been to Chamonix town before, the big one, the one with the cable car queues and the gear shops on every corner. Les Houches sits just six kilometres down the valley, close enough to share the same Mont Blanc views and the same Aiguilles Rouges backdrop, and different enough in mood that Lia and I ended up basing ourselves there instead on our second visit to the valley, mostly by accident, and never regretted it.

The little train that still climbs the mountain

The reason we’d actually come to Les Houches was the Tramway du Mont-Blanc, a narrow-gauge rack railway that has been hauling passengers up the mountainside since 1913, originally intended to reach the summit of Mont Blanc itself before the engineering (and the money) ran out partway up. It never got anywhere near the top, but what it does reach — the Nid d’Aigle, “eagle’s nest,” at over 2,300 metres — is still spectacular and still delivered by the same slow, clattering, slightly nostalgic little train, one of the highest rack railways in France. We rode it up on a clear morning, watching pine forest give way to scree and then to the close, cracked ice of the Bionnassay glacier, and got off at the top to a silence that Chamonix town, twenty minutes away by car, simply doesn’t have anymore.

The narrow-gauge Tramway du Mont-Blanc train climbing a mountainside track above Les Houches toward glaciers

Where the racers train

Les Houches has its own serious ski credentials, even living in Chamonix’s shadow. The Kandahar piste here has hosted men’s World Cup downhill races for decades, a genuinely fearsome, fast run through the forest that locals will happily point out to you from the base of the lift with a kind of proprietary pride, as if daring you to try it. We didn’t — I have some self-awareness — but we did ride the Bellevue cable car up for a clear view across to the Bossons glacier, one of the most accessible and dramatic glacier tongues in the whole valley, its crevassed ice visibly grinding down toward the treeline in a way that made the scale of Mont Blanc suddenly very concrete.

The crevassed white ice of the Bossons glacier descending toward pine forest above Les Houches

What I liked most, honestly, was the pace of the village itself in the evenings — a proper church square, a boulangerie that sold out of pain au levain by ten in the morning, and restaurant terraces where you could actually get a table without a reservation made three weeks earlier. Chamonix does the spectacle. Les Houches does the living.

When to go: July and August for the Tramway du Mont-Blanc and hiking, when the upper station opens fully and the trails around Bellevue are clear of snow. For skiing, January through March offers good conditions on the Kandahar and connecting slopes into the wider Chamonix valley network, with noticeably shorter lift lines than Chamonix town itself.