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January in Tignes, one of the highest of the French ski resorts, and the snow is cascading down most impressively – indeed, many pistes are closed due to the avalanche danger.

So it seems only right and proper to squirm into a drysuit, don an aqualung and slip through a dark, forbidding hole in the frozen waters at Tignes-Le-Lac to avoid the blizzard conditions. Or perhaps not.

Either way, that’s what I was doing. Long gone are the days when you came to a ski resort simply to ski, and ice diving is one of the latest options being offered to non-claustrophobic thrillseekers who for one reason or another find themselves kicking their heels in Tignes.

Surprisingly, no prior sub aqua diving experience is required to spend twenty minutes or so bumping your head on the underside of a frozen alpine lake, and within five minutes of introducing myself at the small lakeside cabin where the operation is based I was out on the frozen surface of said lake in a full dry suit, while my guide/instructor David used one of his flippers to clear away the thin film of ice that had developed over the hole we’d be diving through.

Meanwhile, as snow flakes tumbled around us, David’s companion Alban casually explained how to use the regulator, then wrapped a weight belt around me, slipped fins on my feet and an air tank on my back, pulled a mask and regulator over my face and invited me to slip into the black, frigid water beside David (in case you’re thinking this all seems very louche and very French, both guys are fully qualified PADI instructors who spend their summers working as dive instructors in the Med).

I can’t say it was the most tempting invite I’ve ever had to get wet. I heard the rapidly increased thump of my heart rate and an equally marked increase in my rate of breathing from inside the confines of my neoprene helmet, and this was before I’d even sunk beneath the water. Indeed, before you can make like a penguin you first of all have to allow all the air in your dry suit to escape so you can actually sink.

This became a rather elaborate process of raising and lowering arms like an aquatic semaphore signaller until eventually all excess air was expelled and, with David holding a firm grip on my weight belt, we sank beneath the surface together. (At this point I should also mention that you’re connected to your instructor by a rope, which is in turn also connected to the surface, so there’s no danger of getting lost beneath the ice – which is a reassuring and thought.)

The first sensation is that of the water squeezing your dry suit against your ribs and making it slightly uncomfortable to breathe, which, along with the sound of your breathing kind of takes your attention away from the submarine scenery. Eventually, however, David gives me a tap on the shoulder and points first to the air bubbles leaving my mouthpiece, and then follows them upwards. He hands me an underwater torch to view them all the better.

As they hit the underside of the ice, the bubbles coalesce then scatter like mini, iridescent Frisbees, racing along the frozen ceiling desperately trying to find somewhere to escape into the atmosphere. Many make it to one of the holes cut in the ice (there are several besides the one we plunged through), but many don’t, and they eventually freeze to create formations not unlike glittering stacks of plates and dishes attached to the bottom of the ice. David invites me to run my gloved hand along the ice’s surface and feel the outline of these formations – in some places air still remains in them, and one end may be open, providing ‘pockets’ to grip and pull yourself along with.

It’s dark down here – the ice above is covered by a layer of snow, blocking out much of the daylight – so the torch comes in useful as David points out various ice formations. This is definitely not an activity for the claustrophobic, I note, as I feel my gaze being constantly drawn towards the shafts of fuzzy blue light that indicate the holes in the ice. I have every faith in my instructor (do I have any choice?) but it just feels better to know where the escape exits are.

To be honest it’s no time at all before I’m completely disorientated and it’s only thanks to David literally dragging me around that we make it from one underwater location to another. He shows me areas of the lake’s ice sheet that are just beginning to freeze and attach themselves to the ice above, and these its fun to run a hand through and watch long, clear spicules and sparkling daggers of semi-frozen water bob and clatter against each other. Infinite shades of ice blue, aquamarine, cool greens and glinting whites put me in mind of an ice palace for an underwater ice queen – a deep frozen mermaid perhaps? Eventually we surface briefly in a small ‘ice cave’, a dome in the ice large enough for us both to poke our heads above water yet still remain beneath the lake’s frozen surface. We could be in Antarctica…

You’re not encouraged to head off and explore on your own until the very end of the dive, and in many ways I didn’t mind that at all. Somehow the thought of heading deeper down into the lake (which is quite shallow – the bottom was readily visible) and feeling that cold, cold water squeezing even tighter against my ribs as the pressure increased didn’t appeal greatly.

And yet for all the general frigidness of the whole environment, I wasn’t really feeling too cold. True, I could feel that all enveloping coldness of the water pressing against my drysuit, but since the suit was just that, dry, there was no water actually touching my skin (just as well since I was only wearing a thin base layer under the drysuit) and any sensation of chilliness was more akin to that of having a damp cloth against bare skin than anything else. It wasn’t something you readily get used to though – indeed, like most people I was doing a one-off dive, during the course of which there’s simply no chance to become comfortable or familiar with your surroundings, and by the time our 20-minute tour of the lake was over I have to say that I was quite happy to be dragged out of the entrance hole by Albon and breath clear mountain air along with the occasional snowflake.

That said, I wouldn’t have missed my trip beneath the ice for anything. It’s not just a different world down there, it’s a different universe, about as far removed from the skiers and boarders sliding down the mountains that surrounded us as it’s possible to be.

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