Avalanches and record snow fall in the French Alps have buried some roads, leading to the creation of treacherous ice tunnels which drivers have to navigate on their way up or down the mountains. Footage from Bonneval-sur-Arc, near the Val d'Isere ski resort, showed a front-end loader carving a path through packed snow that had swamped a local route.
The snow-clearing effort on Wednesday created a wall of ice on both sides of the road around six metres (20 feet) high and just wide enough for one vehicle at a time to pass through. Up to 1.8 metres (six feet) of snow fell in areas across the high-altitude Savoy region in just 36 hours this week, where a red alert for avalanches was lifted late Tuesday. Elsewhere on Thursday, rescue workers were still looking for a 39-year-old British skier who went missing late Sunday at the Tignes resort after trying "one last run," a police official in Albertville said.
But access remains limited in many areas. Train services resumed to the Zermatt resort in Switzerland on Wednesday after more than 1,000 stranded holidaymakers were airlifted out of the village in previous days.
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