While mechanical lifts quickly appeared on the sides of the mountains, ‘village stations’ have developed to accommodate an ever greater number of tourists from all over the world, Oisans no longer appear to be a neglected territory characterised by poverty. However, the constraints associated with the mountainous environment have not disappeared: their rudess and unpredictability thus seem to make the situation of part of the population unstable. This memory will thus be devoted to the study of precariousness in mountainous areas. It is all the tensions, between the strong constraints of the territory and its resources, between life choices and difficult situations, between the flourishing white gold economy and the precariousness of those that allow tourism to exist, which make it very interesting to study the precariousness in mountainous areas.