The only signage in Vaujany ... In the Oisans region of the Alps, danger is everywhere and constant. Even for the most experienced guides and skiers, it lurks like a ghost offering signs of its presence with spin drift, avalanche debris, seracs, glaciers, and extremely exposed cliffs. The smart visitors hire guides to reduce the likelihood of accidents like Xavier Cret who is known in La Grave as being one of the best. He is so well respected that Doug Coombs spent 10 years of his life making first descents all over the region with his help. Our group – filmmaker Ryan VanLanen, photographer Heather Erson, and me – was lucky to have pro skier Jessica Baker as our trip leader. She apprenticed with Coombs for four years in La Grave and knows the mountain well, but being that we were in Vaujany ski area, we all relied on Cret. Cret is the mountains after all, but the mountain ghosts do not care. As I was confidently skiing a line down the bottom section of the 40-plus degree Pioches couloir on the backside of Vaujany, I was reminded of the ghosts. Midway down, the light went flat and I lost the tracks of the others. Since there was a rollover, I wasn’t able to see where they had gone. At that point, I didn’t realize I was skiing over a 200-foot cliff and spraying spindrift all the way down to the group watching from below. I calmly stopped and saw Baker doing a typical guide move, pointing both of her poles to one side of the couloir. “That’s how we do it in Alaska,” said Baker, also a Rendezvous Heli Guide and Professional Ski Instructors of America Intermountain Division trainer. As one of the most qualified skiers in the region, she is responsible for teaching the Jackson Hole Mountain Sports School ski instructors. Baker, like Cret, help people enjoy the mountains safely, and now she has added Ski Divas to one of her many projects, which is women’s big-mountain camps that she hosts all over the world’s roughest mountains, including La Grave. After the ghosts revealed themselves on Pioches, we continued the adventure with two other 6,000-foot runs that made our hearts race and legs burn. We teased the ghosts and they teased us. Cret took us to the Pyramid, an aesthetic face from the top of the Pic Blanc lift. Though it looks like a straightforward run from below, the conditions up high were windy, and the soft looking face from the storm two days before was now windblown and icy. Without saying it out loud, we all knew that a fall could mean a slide-for-life over sharky rocks below. Cret and Baker reminded us to be careful as we skied down the top face and traversed over another exposed area before skiing safely another 5,000 feet down to the valley floor. The Pyramid line from top to bottom. One more monstrous line was in store that day: the Fleur couloir, an uber-steep (45-plus degree), 1,000-foot pitch. My legs were tired then, but I was exhausted after that chute. Little hop turns were needed in most parts, and though the exposure wasn’t nearly as scary as the other two lines, the slide would have been long. Throughout the day, Cret presented us with challenging enough terrain to scare us at points, but that’s how we get better as skiers. We play with the ghosts after all, and they play with us.