Meribel Snow Report: 6th March 2012

Three things made me a very happy skier today: it’s cold; 6cm of snow has fallen; and the fourth week of the French holidays has started. It’s probably not immediately obvious why these three factors are capable of spreading general joy so I’ll explain.

The temperature has plummeted from last week’s freakishly hot preview of summer. The slushy snow on piste has firmed up nicely and I no longer feel like a microwaved boil-in-the-bag meal in my heavy ski jacket. Summer is a lovely season but in my opinion it should wait its turn until winter is over.

A little snow fell on Monday. Not enough to qualify as a dump alert, but enough to make the pistes grippy again and offer vastly improved skiing conditions on and off-piste. That’s my opinion, anyway. What sort of snow is best is, of course, a highly subjective matter. I spend all last week moaning about the slush and was surprised to hear friends enthuse about the lovely skiing conditions. Some people prefer soft and slushy snow: I prefer the harder, faster and grippy snow we are currently experiencing.

The four-week-long French school holiday is generally viewed as the time in the season when the slopes are most crowded and the lift lines are long. Sensible, child-free skiers tend to book their March ski holiday after the end of the French holidays. However, I’ll let you into a little secret. The last week of the holidays is often relatively quiet, and often quieter than the non-school holiday week that follows it. The reason is that only 1 of the 3 French zones is on holiday this week and the UK and Belgian holidays are over. Hence the slopes are relatively un-crowded. We only ran into one lift queue today, the Tougnete 2, which was easily avoided by taking the alternative Table Verte chairlift instead.

We spent the morning on the sunny side of the valley, enjoying lovely snow on Mont de la Challe and 3 Marches pistes before heading to the Mont Vallon. There is some good fresh snow off-piste too, especially in those places where enough has accumulated to totally hide the hard snow beneath.

At the top of the Mont Vallon this winter there is a high, man-made wall of snow with an intriguing door cut into it. Go through this door and you will discover a wonderful vista and some inviting off-piste. There was much speculation earlier in the season that this wall of snow was built to prevent skiers going off-piste into the area where a Russian skier was killed in an avalanche last year. Determined to find out whether this was true, I popped into the ski patrollers’ hut at the top of the Mont Vallon to inquire. “No,” the helpful pisteur replied; “We decided to do something to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Olympic Games so we built a snowall.” I guess they get pretty bored at the top of the Mont Vallon all day and they certainly had plenty of snow to play around with this winter. The pisteurs are generally a very welcoming bunch: do go and knock on the door of their huts and ask them about skiing conditions or off-piste routes as they are always happy to help. I think their view is that they would much rather take the time to tell you whether a certain off-piste route is safe or not than have to dig you out of an avalanche later.

If you are not feeling nerdy, please skip to the next paragraph. We noticed today that the pylons on the Mont Vallon gondola are fitted with ARMCO-type metal protective covers but couldn’t work out why. The covers are too high to be avalanche protection and they aren’t structural. My friendly pisteur solved the mystery. “They provide thermal insulation. When the temperature goes up and down the metal of the pylons expands and contracts, and the metal covers help reduce this.” Nerdy mystery solved.

After lunch at the excellent le Grenier restaurant in Mottaret, we took a quick whizz down into Courchevel 1550 on more delightfully grippy and fast snow. We then returned to the Méribel valley via the black run Tetras. It was a risk choosing Tetras as the last run of the day because this run can either be gorgeous or horrid with icy bumps. Today it was groomed smooth and so fabulous that we got cold teeth from grinning so hard. We voted it ‘piste du jour’ and promptly went back up and did it again.

I leave you with an amazing clip of a wet snow avalanche in the nearby resort of St Francois Longchamps during the hot weather last week. If you have been tempted to duck under an ‘avalanche danger’ sign onto a closed piste, please do watch this. Click on CC to see English subtitles.