Inspiration for Snow Days: What is the PGHM?

While in Snow Days With You you’ll find my usual escapist romance with characters you get to know deeply and a setting to take you out of the everyday, there’s something special from real life that inspired the story: the elite mountain rescue squadron of the French Gendarmerie Nationale, the PGHM.

It stands for the Peloton de gendarmerie de haute montagne (the high mountain platoon of the gendarmerie) and it is an organisation of around 250 specially trained mountain rescue soldiers, plus helicopter pilots, winch mechanics and many more support staff on the ground (as well as the civilian doctors that go out with the rescuers). These units, placed at twenty-one locations in areas of high altitude (classed as higher than 2,400m above sea level – for reference, the highest mountain in the UK, Ben Nevis, stands at 1,345m), are the paramedics, firefighters and police of the wild high mountain environment – and boy do they have some stories to tell.

Imagine you are skiing off-piste with a guide on a pristine white snowfield, when your companion suddenly disappears through a hole that wasn’t there a moment ago. If your friend is lucky and is still alive, a team of ‘gendarme secouristes’ (rescue gendarmes) will turn up in their helicopter within about five minutes, set up ropes and equipment and go down to get your friend out of the deep glacial crevasse they’ve fallen into. This is a routine rescue for the PGHM, which they’ll carry out several times each year (and train for many more times).

Or if it’s summer and you’re hiking an easy path from a cable car with your very sporty but elderly mother and she has a heart attack in the middle of nowhere. One of the helicopters used by the PGHM, called Choucas or Dragon in every unit (with numbers to designate the unit they belong to), will fly a doctor out to save her life and take her to hospital in minutes.

The entrance test to the training programme to become a gendarme secouriste is legendary and involves running a marathon in the mountains with lots of altitude gain while wearing a pack, as well as many other challenges and candidates need to already be able to ski and rock-climb to a high level.

Of course not all missions end well. Sometimes nobody can call in an accident and the helicopter is called out to retrieve the bodies. Avalanches with multiple fatalities happen almost every year in the high mountain environment and nobody can stop a wall of fast-moving snow from burying a group of mountaineers. But the call of the mountains is strong and the calling of the gendarmes even stronger…

When I started reading up about the PGHM, I couldn’t not write a story about them, and so Snow Days was born.

Below are a couple of photos of a training exercise on the icefall of the Bossons glacier in Chamonix to give you an idea of the enormity of the high mountain environment and the kinds of challenges the gendarmes face on a daily basis and train for throughout the year. Yes, those are little people with ropes in the photo!