Écrins

The Écrins is France's heavyweight mountain park: 918 square kilometres of core between the Romanche, the Drac and the Durance, holding about a hundred and fifty summits over 3,000 metres and the Alps' southernmost 4,000er — the Barre des Écrins, 4,102 metres, with the Glacier Blanc and Glacier Noir flowing off it in opposite temperaments. The other presiding summit is La Meije above La Grave, 3,983 metres and the last great Alpine peak to be climbed (1877, by Boileau de Castelnau with the Gaspards, father and son), still one of the range's most serious ordinary routes. The park's protected pedigree is the oldest in France — a "Parc de la Bérarde" was already set aside here in 1913 — and its glaciers, surveyed for over a century, have lost roughly half their area in that time; the Glacier Blanc's retreat is the country's most legible climate gauge.

The massif is really a wheel of valleys, each with its own character and no road over the top: the Oisans and the deep Vénéon toward La Bérarde, alpinists' country; the Vallouise opening east toward the Durance, with Ailefroide and the roadhead at Pré de Madame Carle under the Glacier Blanc; the Valgaudemar, the closest thing France has to a Himalayan valley, one long corridor of waterfalls; and the gentler pastoral bowls of Champsaur and Embrunais. Ibex, reintroduced from the 1970s onward, are back on the ledges; the park carries one of the densest golden-eagle populations in the Alps, and bearded vultures again cross the crests.

What's worth knowing before you go

Bourg-d'Oisans (bus from Grenoble) serves the north; the Gap–Briançon railway drops you at L'Argentière-la-Bessée for the Vallouise, and Gap serves the Valgaudemar. The walk from Pré de Madame Carle up to the Glacier Blanc refuge is the park's great accessible ice view — go early, the moraine bakes by noon. Note that the June 2024 debris flow that buried much of La Bérarde closed the upper Vénéon; check current access with the park before planning anything beyond Saint-Christophe-en-Oisans. Huts run mid-June to mid-September.

The connoisseur's valley is the Valgaudemar in early July: snowmelt at full throttle, the Gioberney cirque in flower, and none of the Oisans traffic.