Sunday, March 26, 2017

Resort Skiing is not quite shot to bits : If you are flexible.

The best way to have good skiing is to have a good sense of what the weather is doing and then go where the snow is best on the day. On Wednesday 22nd March Fiona and Reuben and I drove to Verbier. It is about 40 mins drive to La Chable. We had good off piste skiing from the lift system , but at lunch we eat in probably the weirdest restaurant of the season. Weird because the owner is seemingly a friend of Sarah Ferguson and thinks that having a Fergie themed menu is a great idea...
On Thursday we awoke to a fresh snow fall and decided to head to Les Grands Montets. The morning was good and we managed to find a descent down the Retour Pendant where we made fresh tracks all the way. In the afternoon we took up our reservation for the top cable car. This proved not to be such a great idea , because as we skied down the glacier du Rognan, suddenly the weather changed . The wind picked up dramatically and reduced the visibility to zero. We had a minor epic getting down and back to Lognan.
On the Friday the dreaded foehn wind had kicked in. The weather in Chamonix was miserable. But not to worry we headed through the Mt Blanc tunnel and were greeted with fresh snow and very good tree skiing. On the Friday the weather was indifferent in Chamonix so we drove down to Combloux where the weather was glorious. Yet at the foot of the resort it was lacking the essential ingredient , instead it had been replaced by lots of mud. Yet high up everything was fine and we found some good spring snow skiing, yet aspect was everything: The wrong aspect and there was no snow whats so ever.

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