It’s five below freezing on the ice-caked surface of a lake in the French Alps and, as I prepare to slip, seal-like, into the black water, my racing mind is begging me to wimp out. Diving in a frozen lake at night – below ice, beneath the stars, at an altitude of almost 2,000 metres? What an absurd idea.
An hour ago, I was inside a tiny mountain refuge beside Lac Robert drinking tea, the temperature outside dropping by the second. Now, I’m outdoors and zipped into a cumbersome drysuit (designed to prevent water from entering), with blue latex gauntlets sealed at the wrists and a black frogman hood wrenched over my head.
Ice diving as a niche activity took off in the 1990s, offering an alternative adventure for thrill-seekers on their ski holidays. It’s available in two other French mountain resorts, Tignes and Val-Cenis. But here, above the village of Chamrousse where I’m staying, ice diving school Dive Xtreme has launched the region’s most intense, magical, low-impact thrill yet: a night dive in a frozen mountain lake, followed by a starlit night’s camping on its frozen surface amid 2,500-metre peaks.
Forget cold water swimming. This is the equivalent of taking the plunge under the north pole. The appeal, for me, is to get out of my comfort zone and experience what the instructors behind the idea, 25-year-old Thibault Dassieu and Tanguy Chamard, 30, describe as a chance to “connect both outwards to the wonders of the high-altitude landscape and inwards to the adventurer hidden within us all”.
As I wait in the deep snow, weight belts are slung over each shoulder and a heavy scuba tank lifted on to my back. Then a full-face respirator mask is strapped on tight. A gasket on my survival suit is opened, the air rattles out, everything tightens around me and the diving suit sticks to my skin. I shiver. I look like a cosmonaut; I feel like packaged ham.
The lake feels wild and secret, but it’s only a cable car and chairlift ride from Chamrousse, 20 miles south of Grenoble in Isère. The tiny resort in the Belledonne massif styles itself as an easily accessible base camp for micro-adventures and offers skiing, snowshoeing and snowmobiling, as well as short…
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