At one of Val d'Isère's most popular drinking establishments, six glasses of vodka are lined up on the bar. A group of well-dressed young students knock them back in one; these drinks are just the latest in a long line of "shooters" – shots of liquor, to you and me – that they have imbibed over the course of the evening.
As the group stumble on to the icy pavement outside, one boy barely out of his teens, dressed in a smart pink shirt and cufflinks, falls over on to the street. Hardly a surprise when you consider the heady combination of a ski resort and too much alcohol. His friends laugh and take photographs before stumbling merrily back to the warmth of their rented apartments.
It is a scene played out across the 28 bars of Val d'Isère every night during the ski season, where thousands of students flock to play on the pistes during the day and to party late into the night, safe in the knowledge that there are no lectures in the morning. But for 20-year-old Rachel Ward, a gifted sportswoman who played hockey for Durham University, one such evening ended tragically when she became lost returning to her rented room and froze to death.
Her death on Tuesday has shattered the resort's normally rarefied air. Val D'Isère, along with Verbier and Courchevel, is one of the most popular winter destinations for British skiers; a playground for families and young people alike who are attracted by both its exclusivity and its traditional Savoyard atmosphere. This is not just a place to go to ski – it is also a place to go to socialise. A new nightclub, Doudoune, is planning a "snow polo" tournament, in which world-class players from both France and Argentina will ride on 3,000 cubic metres of snow laid out especially for them. The streets below the pistes of Val D'Isère are lined with boutiques stocking Gucci and Prada, and cafés crammed with holidaymakers sipping hot chocolate and espressos behind the frames of their designer sunglasses. They check their BlackBerries for news from their offices back in Britain – but they feel a million miles away. It is a winter wonderland, but the death of Rachel has thrown a pall across the party atmosphere.
Rachel was just a few days into her holiday when she died. A student of natural sciences and a keen hockey player, she had paid £384 for her holiday through an established firm called On the Piste, which bills itself as "the most experienced and most reliable company available to university ski and snowboard clubs". It is used by hundreds of British university students every year: as the name suggests, it is as popular with young people for the apres-ski element it offers as for the actual skiing.
But Rachel's parents trusted her to go. Colin, a property developer and Edna, a solicitor from Halifax, West Yorkshire, saw her off safe in the knowledge that their only daughter was a responsible and level headed young woman.
That much is not in doubt. But piecing together the hours around Monday night's tragic accident should perhaps serve as a warning to the students who continue to drink in the town's bars and pubs.
Rachel began the evening just as most of the holidaying students do. She had a dinner of sausages and potatoes in her shared room at the Jardin d'Alpin apartments right on the edge of the resort. The friends washed down their meal with a quintessential student drink – small amounts of vodka mixed with Fanta.
Rachel and five of her friends then began their cold walk into the centre of town, where temperatures can plummet to well below zero. Their stroll to the pubs and bars was about half a mile, and included a rather slippery walk across one of the resort's main pistes. It may have been Monday, but this is a holiday town, and the centre of Val d'Isère was in full swing. Youngsters, many of them inappropriately dressed for the sub-zero temperatures, would have been swigging from bottles of spirits in the street – possibly for warmth, though more probably for fun. Some in the resort say the behaviour of British tourists has worsened in recent years. As one French rep said: "The British people who come here are well off and are probably sensible at home, but they get very, very drunk, They drink in their rooms and they drink very late at night and often don't wear the right clothes."
Yet Rachel was not one of these. She chose to attend Pub Morris, a popular venue with young British tourists open until the early hours. There, dozens of mainly young revellers dance into the night in front of a live rock band on a floor sticky from spilt beer. Omar Baldaccioni runs the bar, and remembers the group well. He says that they drank strawberry vodka, before most of the group decided to go on to a club nearby. Rachel opted instead to go home – a decision that would ultimately cost her life.
"It is about -20°C here so we never let anyone leave alone," says Baldaccioni. "She must have slipped away without anyone seeing." Another member of staff at the bar added that she had only had a couple of vodkas and wasn't drunk; and that when she left she was dressed sensibly in jeans, boots and a warm coat. But as she exited Pub Morris she made the mistake of turning left instead of right and, in the darkness of a resort where many buildings look the same, she quickly became lost and headed out of town in the wrong direction.
At 11.30pm she made a phone call to one of her friends saying she was lost. Nearly two hours later, at 1.15am, she made a call to fellow student Haydn Johnson, 20, from Coventry, but he had left his mobile phone at the chalet. He noticed the missed call when he got back and telephoned Miss Ward, but there was no answer. He then went to bed; staying in a different room he had no idea she was not back safely. In fact, it is thought she may still have been trying to find her way back before slipping and falling down a 30ft snow bank in the river Isère, where she died, probably from hypothermia.
It was Patrick Fournan who found her; the spot where she died was close to his butcher's shop. "My first thought was to jump in and save her but when I got there I found it was too late," he says. "There were marks in the snow where she had been trying to climb out. It was awful." It was Fournan who pointed out the spot to Rachel's distraught family, who had made the journey to bring their daughter home. Yesterday a simple frosted bouquet of flowers lay there with a message reading: "In our thoughts and prayers, Rachel Ward."
It is thought that Rachel's final desperate phone call may even have been made from the river. There she was identified by the blue wristband given out to students on the holiday so that they could buy cheap drinks, though Rachel herself had not been drinking excessively. Police also found her camera, which contained pictures taken only recently of Rachel proudly wearing her Durham University top.
It seems that when she fell, Rachel had actually doubled back on herself and was just a few hundred yards from the centre of the resort; just a few yards from where other skiers slept safely in their apartment block. It seems that Rachel's death was a tragic accident … but one which will cast a long shadow over the resort.
