Courchevel Snow Report: 29th December 2011

It’s quite busy this week and there was a bad start to the day in Le Praz on Wednesday morning with one of the two bubbles (Fôret) breaking down for a couple of hours causing large queues on the other one. Of course that put extra pressure on the Plantrey chair at the top which also took a while to navigate. Once beyond these two lifts though the rest of the lift system took it all in its stride and that was the last two queues we had to endure all day.

The weather forecast was quite specific that Wednesday would be bright and sunny whilst Thursday would be overcast with light snowfalls. With hindsight, this was correct and making the most of Wednesday was the right thing to do. The ski area above 1650 is the best for sunshine at this early point in the season so a lot of the day was spent around the Signal chairlift area with a couple of detours to runs like Mur below the Suisses chair which had been pisted.

Lunch was at L’Arc en Ciel (ex. Eterlou) where we tried out their pizza for the first time. Very thin, very crispy and very good from €9.50 to €13.00 and big enough to share if you’re having dinner back at the chalet later.

The only other queue we saw was late in the afternoon with a large number of people from Meribel trying to get back to their own valley. If you do ski outside your home valley, make sure you know the time of the last lift (it’s quite early at this time of year and gets later in February high season), and assume there will be a queue. One valley to another by taxi is an expensive extra on your holiday.

This morning we woke to grey skies, light snowfall and poor visibility above 2000 metres. A good day to go sledging on the ‘luge’ run from 1850 down to 1550. We’re expecting the snow to become heavy overnight and continue throughout Friday and into Saturday. So the roads are going to be tricky and it’s likely that the ‘chain police’ will be out enforcing the use of snow tyres or chains. If you’re driving – make sure you’ve practised how to put your chains on before arriving in some layby, in the dark, trying to read unintelligible instruction by torchlight.

From a snowfall point of view this is the best start to the season I can remember.