Courchevel Snow Report: 14th February 2012

Half term is now in full swing and with the temperature this morning at a positively tropical -11°c with blue sky and sunshine, conditions are just perfect. As long as you get out early, avoid the bottlenecks and lunch early then this part of half term is really not too much hassle. This is the main UK half term week and it coincides with some (about a third but importantly from a queue point of view – not including Paris) of the French regions’ vacances.

Yesterday, was still very cold and by getting out on the first lift at 09.05 we got ahead of any queues for the whole of the rest of the day. ‘M’ was the Piste du Jour (again…for the 4th time this week) together with Jean Blanc, the black run that takes you back to Le Praz. We saved Jean Blanc for later in the day.

As it was so cold, we ended up drinking vin chaud pretty early in a mountain restaurant which may have had something to do with the fact that my wife decided mid-morning that she wanted to ski the Grand Couloir. This is Courchevel’s steepest marked run (never pisted as the Pisten Bully would not be able to go up it - it could come down but probably by tumbling end over end – which wouldn’t be good). Depending where you look in books and on the internet this is either ‘The’ or ‘One of the’ steepest marked runs in Europe and starts at the top of the Saulire cable car, along the narrow ridge separating Courchevel & Meribel then down a Couloir or corridor between the rock outcrops and onto the Combe Saulire piste. Fortunately she took our 12 year old daughter as a guide, as she’s the best skier in the family, but from what I heard afterwards, it wasn’t very nice, just scary, BIG odd shaped moguls.

To just show you the difference between skiing and snowboarding, my daughter decided to hire a board today. Now she has lived out here for the past 7 seasons with us and is a fabulous skier. She has had a single, short private snowboard lesson a couple of years ago but today just shows that however good a skier you are, you need to get the fundamentals of snowboarding by taking lessons, before you head out there on your own. She found it very, very hard and I think gained a bit of respect for the boarders who make it look so easy.

So Jean Blanc was the route home at the end of the day and it really was fantastic. Down towards Le Praz there’s a new route cut through the trees which is not signposted but nevertheless ends up in the right place which is a nice addition. Looks like snow tonight and all day tomorrow. Not very much but then it doesn’t take much to freshen up the pistes. Conditions just don’t get better than this.