Courchevel Snow Report: 17th January 2012

Today was a bit manic although great fun. I mentioned in my last report that during a visit to the Belleville Valley to ski with some friends I was able to log the fact that I had travelled 65 kms. during the day’s skiing. Well last night I got a phone call from the same group of friends who fuelled I suspect with either too much bravado or too much whisky (or both) asked if I would join them in an attempt to clear 100kms today.

For some curious reason I agreed. They arrived in the Courchevel Valley from St Martin de Belleville around 10am (with around 20kms. already under their belt). We then proceeded to go as high then as low as we could manage to clock up the kilometres. Top of Saulire to the bottom of Bel Air. Once round Chapelets then over to the Creux Noirs chair followed by a long, long series of blue/green runs down into Meribel Village via the Geai, Biche, Blanchot and Lapin pistes.

Everywhere we went we had great conditions except for the bottom third of the Lapin run approaching Meribel Village which was very hard and shiny. Back into the Courchevel Valley via the Loze chair then a rather circuitous route to the Plantrey chair round the back-pistes of 1850 past the pretty white Chabichou hotel. We were headed up here to ‘have a quick panini’ at the bar of the Soucoupe Restaurant but this somehow degenerated into a full blown lunch at the Bouc Blanc by the time we’d got off the chair. A couple of vast spaghettis and a couple of omelettes later the afternoon’s route started to be discussed.

As it was now 2pm and most of the discussion seemed to involve the dark corners of the far end of Val Thorens, I decided to give it a miss as getting back from there to the Courchevel Valley is not something I want to be doing after 4pm.

So I took a gentle meander down Jockeys, the black run that connects the Bouc Blanc to Le Praz (ie Home!). I’d noticed on the S3V website this morning that it had been pisted so it was in lovely condition and of course as is usual at this time of year completely deserted. It’s well worth checking the S3V site before you go out in the morning if you have Internet access. If you click the tab ‘Courchevel Grooming’ you’ll see little flashing green Piste Bashing Machines on each of the runs which were ‘done’ the previous night. Also available is a tab for Meribel Mottaret as S3V own these lifts too.

The weather outlook is for Wednesday to have a little more cloud then light snowfall on Thursday with heavier snow on Friday. Well we could do with a refresh, after all it hasn’t snowed for a whole nine days!

Back on Thursday….

**Update: Just got a text to tell me the final distance travelled in one day today was 108.3 kms. Beat that & let me know!