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Another season under the belt - 1/5/2012 08:34by Peter Hardy Peter Hardy spends the last days of winter in Les Arcs and Val d'Isère.
The party's over in Val d'Isere. Ok so that's that then, another season under the belt. Val d'Isère finally switches off its lift system this afternoon to bring down the curtain on a truly spectacular season. But as the final fin de saison party ran out of steam and they pulled the shutters down on the Folie Douce, some of us were left with a rather pressing problem: how the hell do we get home? I don't mean back to Val - you had a two-way choice for this: either pour yourself into the bubble down to La Daille, or ski down on some of the most difficult snow imaginable. No, the problem was how, being without a rental car, to get to Geneva for the flight home. Take the bus? The regular bus service between airports and resorts stopped on April 15. Take a local bus down to Bourg-St-Maurice and then a train? The snow train stopped running at Easter. All enquiries were countered with a Gallic shrug. Take a taxi? Too expensive.
Even Arc 2000 can look pretty in these conditions. The only solution seemed to be a bus to Bourg, train to Chambery, second train to Annecy, bus to Geneva, train to Geneva Airport. This prolonged journey would take at least six hours, with connections not guaranteed. The solution proved to be Holiday Transfers a brand new Brighton-based agency offering airport and rail transfers at the best available price. The service is by no means confined to skiing, but works for thousands of sun and city destinations worldwide. While booking in advance makes sense, the company says it can cope equally well - and at no extra charge ? with last-minute requests like mine. All I had to do was get myself and my luggage to a hotel of my choice for the pick up. The shuttle van turned up on time - to the minute. My three-hour journey from Val to Geneva cost a bargain £108.50 and gave me time to reflect on some stupendously varied skiing over the final days of the season. "Can someone please tell me how to ski this?" asked snow guru Pat Zimmer of Top Ski, who's spent the last 35 years teaching and guiding in Val, "because I've absolutely no idea." Certainly by lunchtime each day In Val it has been as if the snow gods have called: "Time, gentlemen, please!" on a vintage winter. Every schuss became a push and conditions varied quite dramatically from turn to turn. But not so in the mornings. I really hadn't planned on this. However, a last-minute invitation to attend the 20th anniversary conference of ABTOF (Association of British Tour Operators to France) proved to be just too much for me. For the first time ever it was being held in a ski resort, and not in any old ski resort, but in Les Arcs.
Ian Davis of TUI at the ABTOF conference in Les Arcs. Arc 1950, pioneered by Erna Low, is still buried under tons of the white stuff and this past week the top slopes have been at their best. I spent a morning with Graham Bell skiing the Flying Kilometer about Arc 2000. No, he wasn't (and obviously I wasn't!) trying to break the world speed record that unbelievably stands at almost 252kph. The now disused course was covered by 50cm of fluffy light powder. You really don't expect to get two of your best days of the entire season in the dying embers of April...and I then I moved on to Val d'Isere for the finale. On Friday I ranked the pistes on the Pissaillas glacier as 9/10 and you could happily ski all the way down to Le Fornet. Like I said, another season under the belt - but I'm not sure I can wait for November. Innsbruck inspiration - 22/2/2012 08:24by Peter Hardy Editor Peter Hardy is in Innsbruck in the Tyrol this week. Other major cities with international airports have parks with lawns and flowerbeds where local people take time out to relax on a holiday afternoon. Innsbruck has the Hungerburg with a wicked 70% slope and more snow than you could possibly imagine. Few tourists bother with Innsbruck's Nordkette ski area, reached directly by gondola from the city centre. They just don't know what they are missing. Its two old double-chairs and modern cabin car to the summit cater for beginners and experts, but virtually nothing in between. Up here there are no snow cannons, but who needs them? This winter there's five metres of the stuff that's drifted to 10 in places. The only worry is that the avalanche barriers are already virtually buried. Another 1.3m dump like last week could pose a danger to the buildings below. But on a Carnival afternoon the vicious low temperatures of last week are just a memory. The sun is shining and people have come out to play...
She's stripped for action. So would you be if you'd just skinned up from your office the city in two-and-a-half hours.
Somewhere beneath the blanket there's a lift station.
Tired mum and skied-out toddler taking 40 winks outside an igloo.
We have snow.
Buried avalanche barriers are giving rise to concern.
World Cup GS is just a whisker away.
Is this is the Innsbruck Ski and Snowboard School office?
It's all mine!
Bird's eye view of the Inn Valley.
That's my city in winter.
See those huts on the ridge? That's my home in summer.
The top of Nordkette is not for the faint-hearted. Miracle on the mountain - 17/2/2012 09:17by Peter Hardy Editor Peter Hardy is spending half term in Italy's Milky Way this week. It's the moment every skier dreads. You go outside after a wonderful lunch in a remote mountain restaurant...to discover that some b@st***d has nicked your skis. Not just your skis, but your poles, too. Today it happened to me in the middle of the Milky Way - 20km and seven lifts away from my base in Sauze d'Oulx. What ever do you do? Well, first you take a good look around. I'm sure I put them just there. But maybe someone moved them? No they didn't, they stole them. It's a bluebird (well, it was a bluebird day, more of starling day now) and I was really enjoying myself. Why does it have to be my Salomon Enduros? Why not some other bloke's Then the harsh reality of the situation sets in. We'd lingered over lunch of cheesy polenta and a carafe crisp local white wine at just a tenner a head. We're already running tight to make the links home - and now I've got no skis.
Baita Gimont. I'm standing in my boots at 2035m outside Baita Gimont, about 1500m above the nearest ski shop down in Claviere. I've no means of getting there except on foot and that'll take at least three hours to hike down there. By then the lifts will have closed and I'll have to take an expensive taxi ride back to Sauze. I'm in deep trouble, but not as much as the bloke who stole my skis will be, if I ever catch him. Had we'd been just metres away across the border in France, I really can't imagine that I would have got more than a Gallic shrug from a restaurant management. But hey, this is Italy where everyone wants everyone to enjoy themselves. Bruno and Marco, who own the glorious yellow-painted rifugio, are almost as upset as I am. I've never been here before, nor met either of them until this moment.
Bruno and Marco Marco calls the cops and within minutes Policeman Paulo arrives on skis. Paulo is equally sympathetic, but tells me I need to report the loss to his colleagues in Sauze when (if) I get back there. Last lift time is ticking away. Suddenly Bruno has an idea. He runs off to an outhouse and returns with a pair of old 190cm skis and equally venerable poles, one minus a basket. The Atomic Beta V 7.20 was a star in its turn-of-the-century day, a grippy embryo carver in that almost forgotten era before skis got shorter and a whole lot fatter. Only 11 years have slipped by, but now its narrow profile and 15 year-old Tyrolia binding it looks an escapee from a ski museum.
Bruno and Policeman Paolo. "Just leave them in your hotel ski room," says Bruno, adjusting the bindings, "and I'll come and pick them up sometime." The journey home was a wonderful trip down memory lane, like a high-speed nostalgic drive at the wheel of a classic car. I guess the edges hadn't been sharpened since 2001 when Hermann Maier won the World Cup on the tuned-up version of these Atomic racers. As a result they weren't so happy on some long, steep stretches of icy artificial snow. But I quickly understand the way to handle them was in Herminator style - don't bother with a turn unless absolutely necessary. Otherwise they carved sweetly with minimum effort and were reassuringly stable at high speed. We caught the last lift of the day and cruised happily down the Clotes piste into Sauze. Sadly it looks like no skiing for me tomorrow morning. I must spend hours at the police station obtaining the documentation needed for my insurance claim.
Peter with the Atomics. But hey, this is Italy where everyone wants you to enjoy yourself - and miracles can happen. I'm in my hotel room getting ready for dinner when the phone rings. "Mr Hardy, there's a man downstairs at reception with your skis." It's Marco. He tells me: "An Englishman staying in France turned up at the restaurant just as we were closing up. He said he took your skis by a mistake." I suppose it just had to be a Brit. Marco then skied down the mountain to his car and drove for 25 minutes to my hotel in Sauze d'Oulx to give mine back to me and retrieve the old Atomics. "I really don't know what to say.." I stutter in amazement. "Don't say anything" he smiles, "just enjoy the rest of your stay and come back and have lunch at Baita Gimont again some time." I will. Peter Hardy is staying at the Grand Hotel Torre with Inghams in Sauze d'Oulx. Is this the best piste skiing in Italy? - 13/2/2012 20:36by Peter Hardy Editor Peter Hardy is spending half term in Italy's Milky Way this week. Ok, so what's this? A near death experience? A black hole? No it's just the interior of our Inghams hotel in Sauze d'Oulx this week - and we haven't o.d-ed on the grappa, honest.
Where in the world? Sauze is weird, wonderful, and the surprise of the season. If you want to find the best piste skiing in Italy (and some of the best snow in the entire country right now) it's here in the Via Lattea - The Milky Way - on the border with France and just an hour's drive from Turin Airport. Oh, and talking of France...it's one helluva lot cheaper this side of the border: 6.50 euros for a pizza big enough for two, 5 euros for a hamburger, 5 euros for half a litre of local wine, 1 euro for coffee. Unlike France, we can actually afford a family lunch on the mountain here.
The slopes are littered with good-value mountain restaurants. Seven years have slipped by since my last visit. In the interim, the region has played host to a Winter Olympics. Once upon a time Sauze d'Oulx was the Magaluf of the Alps, a ski destination that was far better known for its piss-ups than its pistes. By 3pm every afternoon the streets were awash with Tennant's lager and a hardcore percentage of its young British clientele never made it onto the snow before midday - or at all. But Sauze d'Oulx has since cleaned up its act and somehow transformed itself into the charming Italian mountain village that it once was and now is again. Sure, you can still party here big time, but the primary reason for coming here is for the skiing - hundreds of kilometres of rolling pistes that link to Sansicario, Sestriere, Montgenevre and the rest of the mighty Milky Way. To say that I'm impressed is an understatement.
Hardly a soul out on the slopes. It hasn't snowed for over a week, but there still plenty of untracked powder to explore. However, before you do, you need to get to grips with the local Piedmont laws. Off-piste - and that includes the enticing bits between groomed runs - is absolutely forbidden unless you're geared up. That means wearing a bleeper and carrying a shovel, and probe. Like the rest of the Alps it's been mind-bogglingly cold here for the past ten days, but the minus teenage temperatures have helped to keep the pistes in superb condition. Ignore the law at your peril - cops on skis are just waiting around ready to hand out on-the-spot 50 euro fines to any culprit. There's a story of a Brit here doing the rounds. Whether he was actually skiing off-piste or not, no one is quite sure. But he fell just a metre into the powder off the edge of a marked run and broke his leg. While he was waiting in agony for the bloodwagon to arrive, a cop cruised by and slapped a 50 euro ticket on him.
Little green men in helmets. Oh, and if you're under 18 and not wearing a helmet, the same fine applies. The local Piedmont government has just passed a law making this mandatory with immediate effect. The off-piste rule came about after a group of skiers last year recklessly triggered an avalanche that nearly took out a motorway. I don't like regulations in mountains, but they're not banning off-piste - just insisting that you take sensible precautions. That picture? It the eight-storey atrium of the four-star Grand Hotel Torre where we are staying this week with Inghams. The round tower was originally built for Fiat workers in the 1950s. Like I said, Sauze's weird and wonderful. Is this the best undiscovered skiing in Europe? - 21/1/2012 20:26by Peter Hardy Two of our editors are skiing a secret world class destination this week It's a white-out once against across the Alps this weekend with the now familiar story of roads closed and holidaymakers stranded in Austrian resorts because of 5/5 avalanche danger. But we've spent today in Rosa Khutor in glorious sunshine exploring long thigh-burning pistes as well as powering for 1100m vertical through a metre of fresh fluffy powder. Rosa Khutor? You're forgiven for never having heard of it because it only recently evolved - almost overnight - from a hamlet with half-a-dozen houses into a state-of-the-art ski resort. It comes complete with a three-stage access gondola and a technically demanding FIS downhill course that Bode & Co are going to race next month. Here's a couple of clues:
Piste security takes on a whole new meaning.
Back Home. In case you've forgotten where you are. Yes, we're up a mountain in Russia, one hour by road and 25 minutes by train (when they've built it) from the Black Sea summer destination of Sochi, venue for the next Winter Olympics in 2014. RK is the biggest of four new ski villages being built for games and gets the lions share of the events. Crystal is featuring it in their brochure this winter and hope to capture what could be a lucrative niche market here in years to come. So we thought that with 24 months to go to the Games, we'd best take a look at how the Russkies are getting on. The answer is very well indeed, thank you. They've have had to sense to call in international expertise of French Compagnie des Alpes to develop the lift system and other mountain infrastructure. What's emerging is a resort in the Caucasus that is strangely reminiscent of Les Arcs with a bit of Whistler and Tremblant thrown in for good measure.
RK1. Neo-Disney architecture somehow seems entirely natural. Frankly, we were expecting the limitations of other Eastern European resorts - if you like, a super Bansko or turbo-charged Borovets. Not a bit of it. The mountain here match the Alps for challenge and embryo RK can already compete on equal skiing terms with the very best of the West.
Serious terrain. Terrain to match a major Alpine resort. So far there's only eight lifts and 38km of piste, but RK hopes be linked by 2014 to at least two of the other three villages under development. Russian premier, Vladamir Putin, is the driving force behind the development of the ski area. He has a house down the road in the next ski village of Gazprom and security in the area - even when he's not around - is on a stratospheric scale. Right now he's In St Petersburg, but his neighbour, the president of Belarus is visiting this week and apparently making full use of Putin's 1000-strong arm of security men. You have to carry your passport on the slopes and nowhere else in the world have we ever been obliged to go through a metal detector before getting a lift.
Take off my belt and boots? You can't be serious! Security is not the only hazard. The standard of people's skiing - and particularly of snowboarding - is not as high as in a comparable western resort and you need to have eyes in the back of your head at all times. There's a strange custom of strapping on a cushion-like bum protector for skiers and snowboarders alike. We can only conclude that it's deemed necessary because of the number of wipe-outs.
Bum protection. It's been a cool -5 to -10C today but the Russians apparently consider that to be positively Mediterranean as this snowboarder demonstrated. Skiing in Russia is most definitely cool.
We stayed in The Park Inn at Rosa Khutor. Crystal organises ski holidays to Rosa Khutor/Sochi with flights on Turkish Airlines via Istanbul. Stop-overs in the city can be made on the way out to or home from resort. Is this the perfect resort for families with teenagers? - 14/1/2012 09:08by Max Hardy With today being Friday 13th, it came as little surprise to this Welove2ski blogger when everything that could go wrong this morning, as we began the final leg of our Maurienne Valley tour to Valloire, did. With all snow the resort has had of late, reliable snow chains are a must for the journey through the Col du Galibier, the classic opening climb of the Tour de France's 16th stage which marks the entry into this charming Savoyard village. As we soon discovered, ours were not.
A setback, but not a fatal one. After a short delay, marred only by a very slow truck blocking our ascent and a classic case of the missing lift pass, we were at last ready to see what the area's 150km of pistes had to offer us. Quite a lot indeed, as it turned out. The sheer variety of the terrain, spread across the mountainsides of three valleys, is immediately striking. The two gondolas in the village - actually more of a small alpine town with a seventeenth-century baroque church - provide access to peaks of 2534m and 2538m respectively in just a few minutes, each with its own signature terrain which ranges from open blues to challenging black runs and a host of spectacular off-piste opportunities. With some 33 lifts in service, this isn't a resort that just caters to a specific ability level.
What makes Valloire different to the other resorts of the Maurienne, though, is the median age of its riders. For the first time this week, we were seeing dozens of teenagers zipping around, weaving between unsuspecting intermediates. Why, we wondered? The answer soon became clear. Little expense has been spared in building a snowpark that is often classified as one of the best in Europe, and the pull factor this provides for families with older children is palpable. A number of different freestyle disciplines have been catered for, including an excellent half pipe, a ski cross, and a range of medium and expert slopestyle lines that allow riders to hone their skills in the air and on rails. For beginners and younger ones, there are three additional easy parks in the Galibier-Thabor ski area with whoops, curves and jumps for everyone.
A team of four pisteurs works exclusively on the snow park each morning, ensuring its stays in perfect condition throughout the season. It's money well spent, as Valloire has recently taken the bold step of offering a dedicated snow park pass for under 17 euros a day. For families with teenagers that won't leave the park all week, this can work out to be a pretty substantial saving. Away from the hill, Valloire will has plenty more to offer Generation Y, including a cinema, ice rink, discothèque and the popular Mast'Rock Cafe which has a season-long programme of live music events.
Tour operators to Valfrejus include Crystal, Erna Low, ifyouski.com, igluski.com, Lagrange Holidays, Peak Retreats, Pierre & Vacances and Ski Collection. Click on the links to see our other Maurienne Valley features on La Norma, Orelle, Val Cenis, Valfrejus and Bonneval-sur-Arc. 4 ways to keep the whole family entertained in Val Cenis - 13/1/2012 08:38by Max Hardy Today, we headed to Val Cenis, which now formally calls itself Val Cenis Vanoise. The central hub of the Maurienne Valley, we were pleasantly surprised to discover 125km of pistes, much of which is shielded from adverse weather conditions by thick forest of the kind normally seen in North American resorts. If you're looking for a postcard holiday, you've found it. The view from the area's second-highest peak, which overlooks Lac Du Mont Cenis and onwards into Italy, is extraordinary.
But what Val Cenis does best, in stark contrast to the idyllic but small mountain village resorts nearby, is variety. This is a place that offers much more than just skiing, and quite rightly the resort is proud of the range of activities that we think make it the number one family destination in the area. SkiingThat much is obvious. 26 lifts, of which all but two are modern, high-speed instalments ensure that queuing is a rarity (even in high season), and Ben, Matei and I were once more blown away by the quality of piste preparation. It's become something of a theme on our adventures in the Maurienne Valley. It's a great area for complete beginners, too. By the end of their first week they should be able to manage the 11km Escargots green run (the longest in the continent), whilst the wide open motorways above the tree line are typical of a behemoth like Courchevel (minus the chaotic on-slope traffic). But this is still a resort that will satisfy every level of skier, and there are also a handful of challenging black runs as well as boundless high-altitude off-piste.
Dog SleddingWith its high plateau, the Haute Maurienne Vanoise is ideal for dog sledding. A 30-minute introduction to dog sledding can be enjoyed by children as young as two years old for 30 euros, whilst a half-day of instruction and riding the world-class trails can be experienced for 115 euros. Dog sledding is at the heart of the heritage here, and Val Cenis plays host to La Grande Odyssée Savoie Mont Blanc, one of the tougher international dog-sled races in the world because of the topography of the mountain it covers. Cani-raquette, a new activity which combines snowshoeing with dog sledding to brilliant effect, is also available at just 12 euros a pop. Adults and children from 12 years old wear a harness which is linked to the dogs with a reign, allowing you to steer them. Certain to be plenty of fun if the weather on the hill gets nasty, or if you're just looking for something a bit different.
ZorbingWhat do you mean you don't know what zorbing is? Surely you've heard about the crazy Kiwi pastime where human beings are put inside a giant hamster ball of transparent plastic, before being sent careering down a slope? If not, you have now. What's more, you can try it on snow at the foot of the slopes for 6 euros. We can't think of a better way to relax after a hard day's skiing. You might not agree, but your kids certainly will.
Cross-country skiingWhilst the Nordic site in Val Cenis might not be the most prestigious in the valley - the 133km track at nearby Bessans is host to a full schedule of World Cup events this week - it's certainly the best for those new to the sport. 12km of track are free to use for snowshoeing, hiking and, of course, cross-country skiing. Better still, it's in the middle of a protected national park, so expect high plateaus, breathtaking scenery and exceptional snow coverage. If you've ever considered trying your hand at the world's most cardio-intensive sport, this is the place to take your first steps.
Tour operators to Val Cenis include Crystal, Erna Low, Lagrange Holidays, Peak Retreats. Click on the links to see our other Maurienne Valley features on La Norma, Orelle, Valfrejus, Valloire and Bonneval-sur-Arc. How to get your own private ski playground - 12/1/2012 00:07by Max Hardy Ever wondered what it would feel like to take first lift up in the morning, and have the place all to yourself? To ski perfectly-groomed pistes till the end of the day, or any number of excellent couloirs, safe in the knowledge that you can rely on the quality of the snow? Advertisement  We made the journey to the end of the Maurienne Valley, where the traditional mountain village of Bonneval-sur-Arc lies, to find out. In the shadows of the Pointe D'Andagne - the 3217m mountain that overlooks the Maurienne's forgotten village - the snow deteriorates at a snail's pace compared to neighbouring resorts. Not that it would matter much, such is the care taken by the pisteurs to ensure that there's more corduroy to be found than at a Conservative Club tea party.
What's more, the lift system operates at a fraction of its full capacity for much of the season. A problem for most resorts, but not here - the local authority ensures a hefty chunk of its tax budget is spent keeping Bonneval's chairlifts rolling, maintaining the relaxed atmosphere that surrounds the place. It works out well for everyone: riders on the hill have more space to play in, and the natural beauty of the Vanoise National Park remains intact - enabling its rangers to study the local wildlife in peace.
Our guide for the day - Fabrice Personnaz - couldn't wait to show us the freeride possibilities that such an unadulterated mountainside has to offer. The off-piste here is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the inexperienced, but if you're looking to drop in to your first couloirs (without a huge hike to find fresh tracks), then this is the place to be.
One final thought: when you're going off the beaten track, remember your snow chains. It's best to practice before you need them, as we found out at the end of the day...
Click on the links to see our other Maurienne Valley features on La Norma, Orelle, Val Cenis, Valloire and Valfrejus. Warning: skiing is no longer exciting enough - 10/1/2012 21:39by Max Hardy How do you make breakneck freeride skiing even more extreme? Not a question that I expected to contemplate today. Especially considering the resort on today's agenda was pretty little Valfrejus - a purpose-built station less than 30 years young, situated just above Modane and a 20-minute drive from our current base in La Norma.
On the surface, the chalet-style architecture (including a notable lack of the usual large apartment blocks) and easy access from Paris (Paris - Modane is a four-hour journey via TGV) makes Valfrejus an ideal family resort. No Brits in sight, either. But as we arrived at the area's peak, courtesy of Valfrejus' state-of-the-art lift system (with a further 4 million euros about to be invested in further development next year), it soon became apparent that this little village is actually a breeding ground for daredevil types. I am talking, of course, about speed riding. Some of you may remember it from Top Gear, when Richard Hammond, in an Audi A6, raced two maniacs with parachutes and skis from Arc 1950 to Villaroger. If not, you'll soon get the idea - fast skiing, coupled with the ability to leap over rocks or large cliffs with the aid of a scaled-down paragliding canopy. It's nuts, in short. Better still, Valfrejus lays claim to ownership of the world's first speed riding school (some even say the sport itself was invented on these slopes in 2001), The Ataka Speed Riding School, which promises to deliver students to the level required to gain a pilot's license in just five days. It's not the first time Valfrejus has been the site of sporting innovation, either. Skwalling - a failed hybrid of carving skiing and snowboarding - was pioneered here and a world champion of the sport is based in the village. Still, it's got nothing on speed riding. Crazy stuff.
Tour operators to Valfrejus include Erna Low, ifyouski.com, igluski.com, Lagrange Holidays and Ski Collection. Click on the links to see our other Maurienne Valley features on La Norma, Orelle, Val Cenis, Valloire and Bonneval-sur-Arc. How to find untouched backcountry in the Trois Vallées without spending big - 9/1/2012 19:57by Max Hardy Today, we made an incredible discovery. A secret so well-kept and so brilliant that my experience of skiing in the Trois Vallées has been changed forever. Because today, Ben, Matei and I skied fresh tracks in the world's largest ski area, two days after the last snowfall. The best bit? Our passes cost 25% less than the typical rate.
Like most British skiers, I've spent plenty of time exploring the Three Valleys. And for all its benefits, the sheer number of other skiers and boarders on the mountain is just plain annoying. At 244 euros for a week's pass, the privilege of sharing it with them doesn't come cheap, either. So you can imagine our delight yesterday evening when we learnt that Orelle, the so-called 'fourth valley' that connects to the back of Val Thorens via a 15-minute gondola ride, was included for a day in our Ski Maurienne Sans Frontières pass for 10 euros less than the going rate in VT.
Strangely, despite having skied in Val Thorens on a number of occasions in recent years, I'd never explored as far as Orelle before. I'm not the only one it seems - according to Xavier Carroz, our guide for the day and proprietor of Maurienne Hors Piste, most one-week VT-based skiers don't pluck up the courage to try it until Thursday or Friday. Or they never go at all. Which means for most of the week, you can have the pistes virtually to yourself. The skiing is great there, too. But on a day like today, the backcountry is even better. The area's highest peak, the Cime de Caron, lies at 3200m and boasts a myriad of off-piste descents to be reckoned with. With Xavier at the helm (a day's guiding with Maurienne Hors Piste works out at £70 a head for a group of six - a bargain, especially when you consider it's in the Three Valleys), it just doesn't get any better than this. Run after run of untouched snow, with a guide who clearly enjoyed every minute of it. My advice to you? Ski the Three Valleys the Maurienne way, making use of the huge free car park at Orelle's base station, and enjoy a mountain lunch at around half the price of what it would cost you in the cheapest of Val Thorens' establishments.
The pictures speak for themselves, I think.
Tour operators to Orelle include Erna Low and Peak Retreats. Click on the links to see our other Maurienne Valley features on La Norma, Val Cenis, Valloire, Valfrejus and Bonneval-sur-Arc. Three things La Norma has that every major resort doesn't - 8/1/2012 22:55by Max Hardy I won't mess around - today was one great ski day. One of the best in a while. This week, I'm marauding through the Maurienne Valley (you may remember Peter Hardy was there last year) with my crack team of Welove2ski bloggers (Messrs Ben Corbey and Matei Beremski respectively), armed only with a pair of skis and an insatiable thirst for the real Savoie, away from the saisonairres and the parties. Skiing is what it's all about - after all - which is why we've tasked ourselves with doing just that in a different resorts every day for a week, in search of something different. Our adventure began today in La Norma, and we've already found three reasons never to go back to a mainstream French resort...
1. Bang for your buckPowder hounds, take note: this is how it should be done. First, get yourself a Saturday morning departure from Gatwick straight into the heart of the Savoie, courtesy of ski flight specialists Snowjet. Next, a 70-minute transfer to the slopes, where at this time of year you can pick up the keys to a spacious ten-person chalet-apartment for £450 for the week. And no, I don't mean per person. This can't be a real resort, right? A resort where the plat du jour in a mountain restaurant will set you back £8 instead of twice (or three, even four times) that? Where an adult lift pass can be as little as £17.30 per day, and you can get a good bottle of wine in the resort supermarket for £4? Think again. This is La Norma, where you can even buy a three-room apartment for £60,000.
2. A mountain of your ownThe best thing about reasonable prices? They're even more reasonable in the second week of January. It's hardly surprising that the prices drop at this time of year - with a new school term now in full swing, there are simply fewer people on the hill. And with the snow that's been dumping down lately, that suits me just fine. As the three of us headed to the bubble this morning, we were joined only by a small group of locals with fat skis, all looking for some serious skiing. It felt like it stayed that way all day, too. Not because other skiers and boarders didn't climb out of bed and head up the mountains - plenty did - but because there are never any queues in La Norma. Not ever. At full capacity, the lift system can deal with a traffic flow of some 7,000 per day - but only half that number of beds exist in town, many of which are privately owned. Can't argue with that, can you?
3. Heavy-duty terrain everywhereAt 65km, the ski area may not be the biggest in the region. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in pound-for-pound punching power. My surprise as we reached the top of the Clot piste this morning, a short and wickedly steep red run which was once used as a speed skiing course, soon gave way to disbelief as we discovered that there are simply dozens of great descents here - far more than anyone would typically expect for a resort of this size. From the excellent tree line gully that is Arcosses to the winding forest descent of Foret, this is an area that will keep on giving new surprises far beyond the first few days. The abundance of trees also makes it a fantastic spot when the clouds come in and the wind is howling - as it was today. In fact, if the gale force winds continue to cause neighbouring resorts to close their lifts, we may well be back here before the week's end.
Tour operators to La Norma include Erna Low, ifyouski.com, igluski.com and Peak Retreats. Click on the links to see our other Maurienne Valley features on Orelle, Val Cenis, Valfrejus, Valloire and Bonneval-sur-Arc. Then the sun came out - 23/12/2011 09:10by Peter Hardy One of our editors, Peter Hardy, is skiing The Three Valleys this week. Yesterday he skied Courchevel and Le Praz.
And then the sun came out! Well, briefly. After a week of snowfall the skies started clear over the Trois Vallées to reveal some simply fabulous ski conditions. Pisteurs worked from long before dawn to open as many runs as possible. But they where at pains to point out to the gathering Christmas crowds that caution is necessary. The risk of avalanche dropped from 5/5 to 4/5 and should ease further today, but with a couple of metres of fresh snow on top of La Saulire the dangers in the deep stuff remain high. But that didn't stop us have a whale of a time on piste.
Weloveski's Max Hardy taking a breather. During what is being described here as the biggest December snowfall in living memory eating has been taking up much of my down time. Both in and above the different altitude villages that make up Courchevel there's never been a problem in doing this to your heart's content - but at a price. It therefore comes as a pleasant and continuing surprise to discover that this winter you can eat well in the Trois Vallées - sometimes quite remarkably so - for a reasonable price. Up on top of La Saulire, Le Panoramic is Courchevel's highest fine diner with some prices to match. But if a 30+ euros main course is out of your budget, you can still enjoy the sumptuous setting and eat sensibly in the snack bar.
Le Panoramic's outdoor snack bar. Further down the mountain Le Chalet de Pierres attracts a wealthy international clientele prepared to pay 190 euros for two for the magnificent seafood platter. A humble chicken dish costs 30 euros.
Comfort on a cold day in the Chalet de Pierres. But with the weather briefly closing in again it was time to return to the lower resorts. This week the tree-lined runs down to Le Praz and La Tania have provided the best skiing and both villages have some great restaurants at reasonable prices.
Snowbound little streets of Le Praz. Biggest surprise of all is Michelin-starred Azimut, tucked away in one of the narrow streets of rustic Le Praz. It's a three-minute walk from the bottom of the pistes in Courchevel's lowest farming village and you're unlikely to stumble upon it at lunchtime by chance. Too often French restaurants of such illustrious pedigree are both pretentious and over-priced. Azimut is the exact opposite on both counts.
Unpretentious Azimut Chef-owner François Moureaux and his wife Sandrine run the simplest establishment with the finest food at sensible prices that have remained unchanged despite the restaurant's rise to fame. A three-course lunch costs 28 euros prepared alone in the kitchen by François and served by just one waitress, Elsa. Sandrine comes in to help in the evenings. Needless to say it's not three courses, but six by the time the master chef has slipped in three amuse-bouches including a slither of poached foie gras. We make our way back up the hill and catch the last lift home.
Pudding to die for. Click on this link for more of Peter Hardy's features on the Three Valleys. Low down for low prices - 19/12/2011 23:15by Peter Hardy One of our editors, Peter Hardy, is skiing The Three Valleys this week. Yesterday he visited the bargain basement of Courchevel - La Tania.
It's not often you share a gondola with a Christmas tree. It came ready decorated au naturel with fresh powder snow, and a very fine specimen it was too. His guardian, Francois, who works with the ski patrol, was taking it up from La Tania to the rescue centre on the Col de la Loze. "The tree blew done in the wind," said Francois, keeping a straight face, "So it seemed a pity not to rescue it for our cabin. We work seven days a week over Christmas, so a bit of festive cheer does not go amiss." La Tania can spare one tree. The resort is looking as currently looking just about as festive as it gets under a blanket of fresh snow with another 40cm promised tomorrow. The forest which surrounds it is almost as white as the pistes are.
When the weather in the Trois Vallées is bad the locals know that the most sheltered runs in the area lead down through the pine forest to little La Tania. The resort was originally built as a dormitory for the 1992 Albertville Olympics. In fact it remained virtually empty because spectators chose to stay at home and watch the events on TV. For while it looked like becoming a white elephant. But thanks in part to an Englishman it's developed over the years into a charming resort in its own right.
"It's not a part of Courchevel. La Tania is La Tania," says Tim Wall who came over from 19 years ago from Valmorel ((where he'd been working for Neilson) and never left. He began by running his ever-popular Pub Le Ski Lodge and now has the Lodge du Village and French restaurant La Taiga.
Amazingly La Tania has become a little corner of Britain in the Trois Vallées. According to tourist director Nicolas Danel an incredible 95% of visitors to its chalets, hotels, and apartments are British. The reason for or the consequence of this is that prices here are markedly lower than anywhere else in the region. The very French plat du jour of saucisse avec purée de pomme de terre (bangers and mash to you and me) cost 9.90 euros, or a burger and chips for 10 euros. It would be twice that in 1850. However it would be a mistake to think that French gourmet influence is absent. La Tania is home to Julien Machet's restaurant Le Farçon, which has a Michelin star. Machet was the youngest French chef ever to be awarded a Michelin star, but he's entered into the value-for-money spirit of La Tania by offering a 25 euro lunch menu - served within 25 minutes for skiers who are in a hurry. And who wouldn't be, with so much great skiing on the doorstep?
Michelin-starred chef, Julien Machet. Click on this link for more of Peter Hardy's features on the Three Valleys. World Cup in Courchevel - 19/12/2011 10:14by Peter Hardy One of our editors, Peter Hardy, is skiing The Three Valleys this week. Yesterday he watched the World Cup ski racing in Courchevel.
Winning a World Cup race or digging out your camper van, it's all about technique. Snowy! But in the end it was grand weekend in Courchevel with the World Cup being staged here for the first time in 32 years. France's premier resort did it in style. But they only just got away with the weather. After the biggest December snowfall that anyone can remember. They were forced to postpone the Women?s slalom on Saturday until Sunday, while the giant slalom was cancelled altogether.
Brief window in the weather. But what a difference a day makes! Sunday morning brought a brief window in the weather - enough to run the race, partly in sunshine and partly with snow falling.
Spectators flew the flag for France and everyone of all ages was out to enjoy themselves. It was a great social occasion and real success for Courchevel as well as for Austria's Marlies Schild who dominated both legs of the race.
Results board. All in all it was a wonderful build up the Whitest Christmas in the Trois Vallées. However, not everyone managed to blag their way into the VIP tent.
Unwanted guest. Also see our related features Terrific Food at a Sensible Price and All Change in Courchevel. Too much snow for ski racing - 17/12/2011 15:14by Peter Hardy One of our editors, Peter Hardy, is skiing The Three Valleys this week. Today, he was due to watch the World Cup ski racing in Courchevel. But there was too much snow...
Watch the birdie Watch the birdie! Sadly that's about all there was to watch up on the mountain in Courchevel this morning. Some 200 ESF instructors worked throughout the night to clear the course for the Women's World Cup slalom. But in the end the visibility was just too poor. They're going to have another crack at it tomorrow...but don?t count on it, because it's STILL snowing.
Disappointed French fans. For a couple of hours we all stared at an immaculate, but empty course as the flakes kept falling. We had to accept the inevitable - this was as close to a slalom pole as anyone today was going to get.
As close to a slalom... There was a lot of hanging around in cheerful team clothing: but in the end, it all came to this...
Also see our related features Terrific Food at a Sensible Price and All Change in Courchevel. More snow than the whole of last season - 16/12/2011 21:00by Peter Hardy One of our editors, Peter Hardy, is skiing The Three Valleys this week. Today he is in Courchevel...
Pretty as a picture. So what do you do when the avalanche danger risk is 5/5, just a small handful of lifts are working and the snow storm of the century has just turned to rain at 1700m? Answer: you find a restaurant with a roaring log fire and go to lunch. I should have known it was not going to be my perfect skiing day when I emerged carrying my skies from the chalet in Courchevel 1650, where I'm staying, and waded in torrential rain through a metre of wet snow towards the lift station.
Icy reception chez Chanel. "Whatever are you doing?" said friend Olivier who was returning home from the boulangerie. "It's going to be horrible up there. But the rain is just what we need to pack down the base? . He was, of course, right on both counts. Mountain guides like him who ski in the Himalayas and in Greenland make their living out of getting it right. The skiing today was not much short of very miserable until I got 500m further up. Then it was just plain miserable. The rain gave way to a blizzard that's been dumping snow here at the unbelievable rate of 80cm per 12 hours.
Do you know where we are? Here's a statistic to warm the cockles of your heart (and in -10 C and a 70mph wind you need warmth). By Friday morning Courchevel had accumulated MORE SNOW THAN IN THE WHOLE OF LAST SEASON. Not bad for December 16...unless of course you are the guy in charge of organizing the Women's World Cup Slalom which takes place here on December 17. Some 200 ski instructors were spending their second night on the icy course trying to shovel off the snow as quickly as it fell. La Soucoupe is one of Courchevel's most famous mountain restaurants with the requisite roaring log fire for grilling giant steaks and a superlative wine list.
It's tough this mountain lunch business. The group of Belgian bankers at the next door table seemed to appreciate both in copious quantities. I'd hate to have paid their bill. Owner Marta has a bewitching smile. Give me another glass of that red wine the Belgians are drinking and I may never leave.
Marta, owner of the Soucoup. But that would have been a mistake. Outside the window the storm has whipped itself up in the kind of fury you might expect more in Antarctica than in the 3V. It was hard just to stand up, let alone turn in the teeth of the wind. We made our exit in convoy style, counting companions down the mountain to safety. The 3V has its best start to the season in living memory. But boy, I'm glad I'm not racing tomorrow. Also see our related features Terrific Food at a Sensible Price and All Change in Courchevel. Too Much Snow in the Trois Vallees - 14/12/2011 20:48by Peter Hardy One of our editors, Peter Hardy, is skiing The Three Valleys this week. Today he was in Courchevel...
We weren't expecting so much snow Snow's a bit like London buses: you wait for ages for one to come along and then half dozen of them come along together. That's what's happened here in wonderfully white Courchevel and the rest of the Three Valleys. We are buried in what - against all odds after such a record dry and warm autumn - is now turning into the deepest, wickedest start to the season in a generation. Just a couple of weeks ago we were bemoaning the inescapable fact there was almost no snow and Christmas skiing was under threat- and now the 3V has just too much of the stuff! Hang on, especially after those doom-and-gloom pictures of brown slopes last week, how can you possibly have too much snow in the run-up to Christmas and New Year? Answer: if you've got two World Cup races to organize for this weekend and an expected 18,000 spectators trying to drive their cars up a winding mountain road. It's 32 years since the World Cup last came to Courchevel, so faces around here were understandably long when lack of snow (as in total absence) threatened cancellation just a few days ago. Then along came enough natural powder to build the course - and very beautiful it looks, too, just as long as you don't try to stand up on what is in effect a giant sloping skating rink. They've been injecting water every few centimeters into the mountainside to create the perfect racing surface. Some 400 people have been adding the finishing touches today. But the trouble is that no one seems to have told The Man Upstairs.
Shovelling is a serious business in Courchevel According to our weather forecast MUCH MORE snow is on the way. The organizers are expecting another metre, maybe even a metre-and-a-half to drop out of the sky between now and when the first competitor in the Women's Giant Slalom powers out of the starting gate on Saturday morning. So tonight and tomorrow night 200 ski instructors will work under arc lights throughout the wee small hours shoveling the new stuff of the course just as soon as it touches the deck. Whether they will win this epic Sisyphean battle remains to be seen. Still, it's terrific news for the rest us mere mortal skiers. I'm finding it hard to absorb this myself, so let me just make it absolutely clear: if you, like me, you are going to be spending Christmas in the 3V you should right now be pumping the air like a lottery winner.
Cold comfort stop High westerly winds brought blizzard conditions to the summits today and the links to the rest of the 3V were closed and we had to cancel a trip over to higher Val Thorens where snow conditions are now nothing short of sensational. Instead, we had to content ourselves with some knee-deep powder skiing through the trees and on deserted pistes that have yet to be groomed. Poor visibility resulted in an early lunch...but that's another story.
Skiers in Courchevel 1850 Also see Caitlin Smith's blog from Courchevel. Winter to the right and autumn to the left - 26/11/2011 17:31by Peter Hardy
The Grande Motte glacier above Tignes today Peter Hardy reports on snow conditions in Val d'Isère and Tignes, November 26, 2011. Ok, so we have a crisis. There's no snow in Europe, and frankly nothing serious forecast. Well, that's not strictly true, I've just had two of the best November skiing days of my life - and wonderfully, there has been a glorious glut of them. On the Grande Motte glacier above Tignes was - on piste - just about as good as it gets. Underfoot there's a metre of natural snow at the top. Overhead there's perfect blue sky and a temperature of around zero degrees, and there's zero wind. Oh, and there's almost no one else here. Vertical? Well how about 1550 leg-burning metres with not a rock, not even a pebble in sight. Ok, so the last bit down to Val Claret is on artificial...but a metre of artificial. I can live with that
Teaching in Tignes
La Face downhill course in Val Advertisement But what scares me is the view. Stand at the top of the cable-car and look towards La Plagne, Courchevel, Meribel and all points towards Chamonix, Courmayeur, Verbier, and beyond and there is no snow. When I say 'no snow' I mean, like, not a single flake. The world, in that direction, is relentlessly and unredeemably brown. Browner indeed than Jackson my chocolate Labrador who at least has a white chin. But look right towards the wonderful but not so fashionable Mauriennne Valley and Italy beyond, and the mountains are white. I'd never seen anything like it and there was more to come. Val d'Isère bravely opened this weekend. Three weeks ago a local weather anomaly dumped 160cm of snow on Val but summer-like temperatures have since removed most it. However they managed somehow to open the top of Solaise as well as the upper half of Le Fornet including the glacier. Conditions are surprising good.
Sunbathing at 3032m To give you an idea of what's happening in the Alps right now, hear this. A new mountain restaurant has been built at the foot of the glacier run. On Saturday it had its 'soft' opening - a barbecue on the terrace. Nothing strange about that, you may say. But hang on...a barbecue on in warm sunshine on a glacier at 3000m...in November? Click on the link for our Val d'Isère resort report. What d'you mean, no snow? - 4/4/2011 12:38by Peter Hardy Don't believe everything you read, says welove2ski editor Peter Hardy.
Val d'Isere, April 3, 2011. Photo: John Yates-Smith/YSE Have you noticed that the whole business of skiing has been getting a right good kicking just lately? Just because it's not been a vintage season in Europe and we're all feeling financially challenged, there's no need for newspapers to put the Salomon boot in. Like James Blunt we're being duffed up for the sake of it, without any real justification. First off, let me get one thing straight: It's been a dry winter in the Alps, one of the driest in 40 years. But piste conditions in all major resorts - contrary to popular belief - have ranged from Acceptable to Very Good throughout the season. Right now most pistes are skiing at their spring best. Andorra's has some of the best conditions it has had for four years. Scandinavia's been great, and North America's vintage!
Åre in Sweden on March 30, 2011 But, ask any tour operator, the biggest single problem in selling ski holidays this year has been the public's perception of snow cover - not the snow cover itself. There's a month full of bargain holidays to be had, but it seems they just can't give them away. Back in February, tour operators like YSE and specialist ski travel agencies including igluski.com and Alpine Answers reported a massive blip in sales after The Times told everyone that conditions were terrible.
Above, how The Times saw the snow on "February 12, 2011". Make sure you read the real date at the top of the webcam image Below, what the snow was really like on February 12, 2011  'Resorts such as Val d'Isère have no more than a sprinkling of white among green pastures and grey escarpments,' The Times reported on February 12 in a doom-and-gloom article on prospects for families heading to the Alps for half-term. Huh? Conditions that week in Val were a little short of superb. How could such a mistake be made? It transpired that the story originated from an unchecked source on the internet. In this case it was based on a webcam that did indeed show Val in a green and grey light. But always read the small print - the picture wasn't live that February day. It had been taken in November 7, 2010, long before the season began!
The Ice Bar, Mayrhofen The Thunderer got it wrong - but the Daily Mail did too: 'Fatalities in Austria up from 14 to 28 already this season', it screamed on March 5. The article went on:'The number of deaths at ski resorts is on the rise across Europe, with overcrowding and a booze culture to blame, according to new research. This season may have not been a vintage year for snow, but skiers have been indulging in plenty of après-ski and that is the reason for the increase in fatalities, experts say. Researchers in Austria have determined that the number of deaths at ski resorts in their country is more than double last year's tally - and there are still two months of this season remaining.' It's a good story, and as a journalist I'm all for good stories. But the trouble is that this one is just not true. Not a word of it. The fact is that the overall number of ski deaths in Austria has actually nearly HALVED so far this season - 46 compared to 86. You can read the true figures here, which we published exclusively last week.
But basically the total of off-piste deaths is the lowest for decades because the snowpack has been remarkably stable. Let's be honest, the off-piste also been cr*p for much of the winter and personally I suspect that a lot of ski tourers have stayed indoors huddles around their ceramic stoves, when normally they'd be skinning up their local mountain. The number of deaths on piste in Austria is roughly about the same as usual - 43 at the moment, compared to 45 last year. I talked to the bloke at the source of these figures who's mystified by what's been buzzing around in cyberspace. It seems that the mistake came about when an Austrian online newspaper got the figures wrong. It failed to appreciate that the figures were divided into two sections - to get the total number of deaths you had to add the piste and off-piste together. Other newspapers just took this report as it was - ignoring the fact that 40% of the deaths were due to natural causes. I mean, you've got to die somewhere, haven't you? And what about the booze? Collisions, both with trees and other snow users are up. But is alcohol to blame?
Accidents involving collisions are up. Photo: Global X "Alcohol is obviously a likely influence in the deaths on piste, but there's no evidence at all to back this up,' says Hanno Bilek, who compiled these official figures and is the leading Austrian expert on Alpine safety. "In my mind lack of fitness, along with an over-estimation of technical skills and physical ability, are the main causes." So, another vodka-and-Red-Bull in the Mooserwirt won't affect my skiing, then? Yes, of course it will (especially if you've had a few already). Drink sensibly but, contrary to what the tabloids and the internet says, alcohol is not the reason for the increase in fatalities...er...because there isn't an increase, there's a massive drop. The moral of all this is that just because it's posted on the internet, it doesn't make it necessarily true. The next time someone says there's no snow in the Alps, or warns of carnage on the slopes, it might be worth checking it with welove2ski before you cancel your holiday.
The Trofana Alm apres-ski bar in Ischgl Glass Kalashnikovs, giant moguls, and Mardi Gras in Verbier - 12/3/2011 14:51by Peter Hardy Editor, Peter Hardy, makes his annual visit to Verbier - March 11, 2011
Spring? Did I say spring? Verbier's just had (almost) 60 days of consecutive blue-sky days. As the season marches relentlessly onwards, the sun's getting some power in it, enough to make me reach for the Factor 30. You have to make that difficult choice between cruising what are still some pretty remarkable pistes - or lightly grilling yourself over a chilled bottle of local fendant on the terrace of a mountain restaurant. We did a lot of both.
Busy Mardi Gras piste After such a dry winter to date it's a credit to the grooming guys here that's there's not a rock in sight and most runs are remain grippy all the way down to town. The off-piste? Well, just about exhausted is the best way to put it. But if your are prepared to slide down and around some bumps the size of Bentleys, a good guide can usually find you something soft and deep. Good guides? We've got Guilia Monego, one of the all-time great freeride skiers who now works for Verbier guiding company, Powder Extreme, along with French freerider Sebastian Saule.
Warren Smith (right) with our friend, crime writer Peter James I tell you, it doesn't get any better than this, does it? So many world-class skiers and so little snow. Yes, it does. Our own Hertfordshire-born ski guru, Warren Smith, is also out there with us on the mountain, defying a back injury to have some fun in the sun.
Editor, Peter Hardy, on the piste Oh yeah, we've also got George and James along for the ride in Verbier in what, because of the lack of snow, has been a very strange Mardi Gras week even without the fancy dress. George? George Clooney's been staying in Chalet Kernow and popped out for a ski and a cup of coffee. James? James Blunt and his band brought their tour bus up here on Thursday for 12 hours between a gig in Amsterdam and another in Zurich on their 13-month world tour. He's a friend of mine so it was good to see him, and I spent a couple of years touring with him and his band for my book Different Country, Same State.
James Blunt (right) with bandmate, Johnny Garrison, in the Farinet Lounge Bar James himself was the only one in a party of dozen who actually made it up the mountain for a quick few turns on Thursday afternoon. Well, if you've got a lift named after you - and he's got a six-pack mid-mountain - I guess you've not got much choice but to take a girl for a ride. The rest of the band were all pretty wasted but, along with James, they all managed to show up for a late-night party at the Farinet Lounge Bar.
Mardi Gras evening at the Farinet Lounge Bar Owner Rob Sawyer, who was recently badly injured in a collision with a snowboarder, couldn't be there. But he did leave a kind of unusual gift for James (who saw service in Kosovo when he was a captain in the British army). It's a glass Russian Kalashnikov powered by vodka, with a handy glass grenade filled with whisky on the side. The tour bus then headed for Zurich and we headed back to our rather more comfortable billet this week. No. 14 Verbier is a truly smart new chalet from Verbier Exclusive that pushes accommodation in the resort up a notch. It's the brainchild of David Pearson, who founded Ski Verbier, and his business partner, Tom Avery, who is a celebrated Arctic explorer.
This gives a whole new meaning to 'shots' What they've come up with a sumptuous chalet that can be rented in its entirety by corporate groups or private individuals per week for a modest £36,400 to £91,000. When not booked it reverts to a boutique hotel with rooms from £560pp inclusive of all food and drink.
One of the bedrooms at No. 14 Designer Fiona Barrett, wife of footballer Sol Campbell, has done a grand job on the interior with superb living areas, pool and spa, along with comfortable bedrooms. Personally, I'd have given a little more thought to the bathrooms. There are a few teething problems but overall it works well, and the food is of exceptionally high quality. For further information, see our Verbier resort report. The Old Bill in Bulgaria - 1/3/2011 20:35by Peter Hardy "Bobbies on the bumps, three-legged dogs and Bulgarian tequila, where will it all end?" asks welove2ski editor Peter Hardy. "'Ello, 'ello, 'ello, what have we here?" Blimey, it's the Old Bill in Bulgaria! Pamporovo has just become the latest resort in the world to bring in piste Peelers to patrol their slopes.
"We're on the lookout for drunks, reckless skiers, and those who dodge under the ropes onto closed runs," these two told us, bending their knees in time-honoured style when we ran into them - fortunately not literally - just below the resort's iconic TV mast this morning. Well, I think that's what they said. To be honest, guv, there was a bit of a language problem, but then they were all smiles. Winning hearts and minds rather than wielding rubber poles is clearly the name of their game.
"Hopefully their presence acts as a deterrent," said our ski instructor guide, Kras. "They have the power to confiscate lift passes and to arrest people who don't behave properly on the mountain." With a tumbler of wine in a mountain restaurant costing just £1.60 and a giant shot of Bulgarian tequila the same (Bulgarian tequila, did I just drink that, let alone write that?) many people obviously don't behave as they necessarily should. Is it my imagination, or have I just seen a three-legged dog crossing the slope? The temptation to take too many holiday schnapps can clearly be a problem here.
The three-legged dog Actually the Brits, Greeks, Turks and Romanians who head the list of foreign visitors to Pampo all looked remarkably well behaved. Pamporovo is essentially a place for beginners and intermediates who take their first steps on skis in a truly delightful setting on wooded slopes with a wonderfully gentle gradient. Personally I should have thought that, if you're trying to wrestle with a snowplough, the last thing you want is a skinful of Bulgarian tequila slopping around your midriff reminding you that you've got the weight on your uphill ski. But there you go, there are worse jobs than being a piste cop. "They ski well," I mutter as the duo set off ahead of us.
"And they should do," says Kras, "I taught them." It's my first visit to Pamporovo, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed. In recent years the introduction of a couple of six-packs has greatly improved the lift system. But, as in so many other resorts across the world from Risoul to Revelstoke, recession has taken a bitter bank-related toll. The 360-degree panoramic restaurant up the TV mast has remained closed this winter and the shells of partially-built, but now postponed or abandoned, apartment blocks scar the landscape.
Advertisement  Think on the bright side. Snow's thin on the ground, but the slopes are beautifully groomed. The sun is shining and after recent visits to the French Alps and to Scandinavia the prices here are a dream. What's more, with half-a-dozen schools in competition with each other the level of instruction is high. Until now the problem has been that the quality of acceptable four-star accommodation has been generally low - and higher than that, non-existent. However, all that is beginning to change. The Rhodope mountains are a popular year-round holiday spot for wealthy Bulgarians, not only from Sofia but also from the second city of Plovdiv which is a 90-minute drive away. An increasing number of them are buying up old farmhouses and converting them into holiday homes. This week we're staying in much the smartest of these at Gela, a 20-minute drive from Pamporovo. Villa Gella - with the extra L - is, as far as I know, the first five-star rental retreat to be built in the mountains here. It's in an amazing position six miles as the crow flies from Pamporovo and 20 minutes drive. You can actually see the Pamporovo TV mast from the chalet terrace.
The enormous interior houses six bedrooms, all en suite and all with fireplaces. The star is the Oriental master bedroom with its two four-posters, a walk-in wardrobe/dressing room complete with desk, and en suite bathroom with corner whirlpool bath and separate shower. The living area is huge, with fireplace, vast sofas and dining area. Outside is an enticing terrace with yet another open fire. There's an indoor swimming-pool, Jacuzzi and steam room, a study with WiFi. Guests at the villa, which is available for rent all year round, need to work in at least one day for sightseeing to the World Heritage city of Plovdiv and a visit to the nearby caves. The villa's not totally finished yet - they're still sorting out a few minor teething problems. But what we particularly liked was the feeling of being in a real Bulgarian village where the food is not just what they like to call 'mainly locally sourced'. It's entirely so - right down to the cow, pig, the yoghurt, and the apple juice that comes from the trees in the garden along with the honey and wine. The Villa Gella website is coming soon to a computer near you soon. As I write, the weather's already changed and it's snowing cats and (three-legged) dogs in Pamporovo today. Candles, teepees - and sausages in your backpack - 7/2/2011 12:58by Peter Hardy Our roving editor, Peter Hardy, spends a final day in the Swedish resort of Åre - February 6, 2011
So now I understand why they keep the best skiing in Åre for February...because they don't have it - usually - in December and January. But, boy, did we get it this weekend! Before we got stuck into the powder the problem was the ice. And I'm talking about Ice with a capital 'i'. It's not the stuff you find in a gin-and-tonic, but what clings to the pylons, gondolas, cables and chairs on the upper half of the Åre ski area. The basic snow around here is sea snow that sweeps in predominantly from Norway and Iceland beyond. When the temperature is relatively warm, it's full of moisture and clings to the lifts. When it's cold, the snow falls as light, Arctic dust that produces phenomenal powder days.
But to open the top of the ski area you've first got to hack off the ice before you can fire up the lift system - and, as our pictures, show, that ain't easy. In the early hours of Saturday morning Carlsberg-fuelled rumours around town where rife. This was to be the day - and what's more, the ski opening hours were being extended from 9.30am to 4.30pm instead of the usual January 3pm. I didn't exactly go from club to gondola, but shall we say that the breakfast pause between the two wasn't nearly long enough. However, fresh powder at the top and a magnificent descent all to way to the main village quickly wiped away any cobwebs.
The more I see of this ski area, the more I am absolutely hooked. There's so much to do. The two 20-year-old Dutch pro-snowboarders, who've been my companions on- and off-piste for much of the week, describe the Åre snowpark as 'in the top three in the world.' Flachau in Austria was right up there, they said, but neither could agree about the third. Certainly skiing the black line was scary beyond belief - even if you avoid the actually kickers. We're talking 20m of air here. I mean, unless, you know what you're doing, it's insane! The red and blue lines make a lot more sense to most of us.
Park-age locals sensibly strap on spine protectors as a matter of course each morning as they climb out of bed. Safe skiing is like safe sex, it's what you do, dude... So finally, after three visits over 15 years, I now have a clear understanding of the ski area. The various Åre resorts are spread out along 15km of the shoreline of Lake Åre. While there is a regular free ski bus linking them all, it is essential to work out the basic geography before choosing your accommodation.
Åre By is the main and very attractive village in the centre with most of the hotels and the rental apartments. From here you can reach Åretopp Plata - the open skiing above the treeline - by cable-car or by an eight-person chair and subsequent gondola from the race arena on the eastern edge of Åre. Åre Björnen is the most popular base for families with small children. It's situated a five-minute drive away to the east of the centre. The rental accommodation is ski-in ski-out with ski school and other activities on your doorstep. From here a 2km road lined with multi-million quid chalets winds up to the five-star Copperhill Resort complex. In summer you can tell which of them are Norwegian owned - they have eco-friendly grass roofs.
The hotel has its own ski-lift. Björnen is linked to Åre By with a series of mainly easy, wooded runs. These are sheltered from the prevailing winds - and the snow falls vertically here rather than horizontally on the main mountain. It's a great place to ski when the weather closes in. Tegefjäll is a separate little village to the west that is linked to larger Are Duved, still further west in the direction of Norway. Few foreign visitors bother to catch the bus down here - and they don't know what they're missing! Tegefjäll is my favourite ski area in the region and reminds me strongly of Beaver Creek in Colorado. Just the pistes, mind. The village itself has one bar, one restaurant, one hotel, and some good apartments.
'Quiet' is an understatement, but the skiing is wonderfully varied with usually empty slopes and a huge variety of interesting terrain. One particular feature that I find immensely attractive are the wayside huts - with log fires lit by the ski patrol. Here you can picnic for free, grilling the steaks or sausages that you bring along in your backpack. Traditional huts have more recently been supplemented by North American-style teepees.
So when to go? March and April are the best months with the longest days and the most sunshine. Good snow-cover is pretty much guaranteed and the resort doesn't close until the beginning of May. This far north, December's pretty dark, although the ubiquitous candles inside and outside almost every building give the whole place an air of enchantment. January has longer days, but usually the harshest weather - the sun's still low on the horizon. They try to open the magical top of the ski area, but it may remain closed throughout the month. Advanced skiers could find this frustrating. However all but a handful of the 46 lifts will be open. February's good, but this is high season and the resort's at its best, but busiest.
Where to stay? Here's my personal choice: Björnen for families with children aged up to eight or nine years. Tegefjäll and Duved for families with older children under 13 years - accommodation costs are definitely lower here, making Tegefjäll in particular suitable for adults on a budget. Åre By for everyone else. If you do stay here, make the effort to get to Tegefjäll. The kids' trail, dotted with all sorts of 'talking' wooden characters and animals, is compelling for all ages.
I stayed with Neilson, which has the widest range of accommodation here. They fly a weekly charter from Heathrow to Östersund with a transfer time of one hour. Tiny airports like this really take the hassle of flying. We actually took off 10 minutes early and arrived the same. I'd entrusted my car to Airport Parking and Hotels who'd booked me in with MBW Valet Parking. I'd use them again...and yes, I'll be going back to Åre for a fourth time. Click on the link for our Åre resort report. Don't say "mush" - 4/2/2011 13:05by Peter Hardy Our roving editor, Peter Hardy, tries out his husky voice in the Swedish resort of Åre - February 4, 2011
Okay, I can tell you this much: it's definitely not 'mush!' if you're standing on the runners of dog sled trying to convince 10 Swedish-born Alaskan huskies to give it some paw power, please don't say 'mush!' Judging by the pained expression on the face of my right-hand 'wheeler' I've just said something that in canine lingo is offensively lavatorial. Mind you, it's not as lavatorial as what he's just done. "Framät," whispers my instructor Ricky, formerly a mechanic from Stockholm. Somewhere along the line Ricky swapped wheels for worming pills and answered, in real Jack London style, the Call of the Wild. I've set aside my skis for a morning to join him. "Say, 'framät!' he repeats. "Framät!" I yell. The response is roughly similar to what happens when Lewis Hamilton floors it on pole. Somehow I manage not to tumble off the back. This would have been unfortunate for me, but much more so for the Turkish mum and her two pre-teen children who are my sled passengers. They've foolishly entrusted me with their lives. "Don't worry," I tell her, "I've done this before." I fail to mention that last time in Lapland I turned the sledge over and smashed it.
The team surges forward at breakneck speed. I do try braking - pushing down on a bed of vicious spring-loaded spikes that dig into the snow. But the dogs are so fresh and strong it's like speed-ploughing a field. "Vänster (left)!" I shout at my lead dog, whose name I've already forgotten. He promptly leads everybody Höger. Yeah, that's right, you got it. I tell you, it's not easy - you've got to know the team and, more importantly, they've got to know you. Ricky and Michael from Åre Sleddog Adventures know all 62 dogs by name. They know what each of them likes for breakfast - and they love every single one of them. The reward is that they get absolute devotion right back. There's leaders who are wickedly smart - much smarter than you, or rather, me. Then there are swing dogs and point dogs and wheelers.
Wheelers are the rugby forwards of dog-sledding - they're the biggest guys in the pack and take the strain just in front of the sled. Also, of course, there are the inevitable smart alecs. You get them in every profession and dog sledding is no exception... "Let me see now. If I get up close and say something really, really rude to that blonde bitch in front of me, she's bound to muddle her traces and take a purler. Then we'll all get a break and maybe they'll kick that British blogger bloke off the runners and get us a real driver. Woof! Woof!"
In a two hour trip - tea break in a hut with an open fire included - the dogs run for 15km and we struggle to stay on the sledge as we bound along the frozen lake and through the surrounding woodland. It's a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours in Åre: good though the skiing is here, you'd be mad not to give it ago. By the time we get back to where we started every bone and muscle in my body aches. Ricky tells me that if the dogs don't work out every day, they get depressed and refuse to eat. I need to spend a little time thinking about that...
Click on the link for our Åre resort report. Reindeer Åre at full throttle - 3/2/2011 09:06by Peter Hardy Our roving editor, Peter Hardy, is in the Swedish resort of Åre this week - here's his report of February 3, 2011
Blogger, Helena, in action "Take it very easy here," said my guide, as we gazed down through the trees to the frozen expanse of Lake Åre far below. "It's steep and narrow and you need to keep in my tracks at all times." On skis those moments of advice are always scary and usually followed menacingly by: "Whatever you do, don't fall." On skis you've only got two legs to point in the right direction. But when you're at the controls of a 120kph 500cc snowmobile, it's a whole new ball game!If you spend a week skiing in what is rapidly becoming one of my top ten favourite winter destinations anywhere, taking time out for a snowmobile safari is an absolute must.
Call of the wild Anyone can do it. All you need is warm clothing (provided), nerves of steel, and a love of crazy, mind-boggling speed...ie the tools of the average committed skier. Oh, you do also need to bring along a valid driving licence and be fit to pass a breath test. Swedish cops apparently also ride snowmobiles. The reward for me was two hours of unequalled adrenalin and petrol-fueled action against a wild winter landscape that came complete - on cue - with a whole herd of reindeer. At one stage, when we cut fresh tracks across an exposed ridge, an 70mph tempest threatened to blast us off the mountain.
Clearly not that way... It all began calmly enough with five minutes of basic instruction on the edge of the lake at Camp Åre, which co-ordinates all the extra-curricular activities around here. These range from kite-boarding and ice-karting to zip wiring, winter fishing and dog-sledding. "If you want to right, lean right. If you want to go left, lean left," our guide explained. Sounds easy? It was - on the lake - but when you're slaloming downhill through the trees at 50 degrees it's definitely white knuckle time. Fortunately the handgrips are heated!
Reindeer grazing in this remote area To start with we roared across the lake at 60kph, getting a feel for how the machines handled. Then we headed up the mountainside and into the wild, stopping for a cup of coffee in a remote mountain hut. Going up from the lake was easy. Coming back down, I can tell you, called for the motorized equivalent of a snowplough - a heavy gloved hand on the brake.
Waterfall at dusk Too late to go skiing now - the lifts close early at 3pm at this time of year - and so it's time for a spot of sightseeing. Tännforsen is Northern Sweden's answer to the Niagara Falls - back in the 1950s a guy rode a bike across the waterfall on a tightrope. In winter it's half-frozen and the best time of day to visit is at dusk when the floodlights come on. Refracted light on the ice creates a glorious palette of colour.
Fancy a cold drink at the bar? But much the best bit is the adjoining igloo that's been built here each winter for the last 13 years. It lasts from November to May and has a cool-on-the-bum amphitheatre, bar area, bedrooms, and even a bathroom with basin and ice loo all carved out of ice. Click on the link for our Åre resort report. Getting into the spirit of Åre - 2/2/2011 14:12by Peter Hardy
Ok so yesterday wasn't the best day for showcasing the slopes in Scandinavia's best ski resort. So I got stuck into the spirit of the place instead. Up the mountain it was snowing hard, giant wet flakes and zero wind. "Just the stuff for establishing a really strong base layer," claimed Anders, my optimistic guide. "Mostly we get Arctic powder. That's great as a top layer, but when there's a wind it blows away like dust. This is just what we need."
Sure, I take the point. Up high it was just dandy. We couldn't see a sausage, but it felt just wonderful underfoot - 15cm of fresh snow, going towards 30cm. Unlike France, they've got lots of the stuff here. But much of the higher terrain was closed and down below on the home run...well, yeah, let's have a little honesty here...the precipitation was coming down in liquid form. It felt like skiing on a bed of sushi rice while standing in the shower. You know the going's tough around when they've got the piste lights on full beam at midday. With Stefan and Stefano, two 20-year-old Dutch boarders, and Helena, Welove2ski's sensational Swedish saisonnaire snogger, we blasted down the deserted slopes at a range of speeds - fast, or very fast - depending on the visibility. And then we did the only thing that rational human beings can do on a murky day such as this. We went to a distillery.
First and foremost, Buustamons is a remote gourmet restaurant with bedrooms attached. But it's also home to a rare private still. In winter you can get there on skis, but not by car...and given Sweden's strict drink/drive law that's unquestionably the way it should be. Owner Lotta Florin and her full time staff of just four make 1,000 bottles high quality hooch each year. That is, when they're not making beds or cooking and serving in the restaurant.
Alcohol is viciously taxed in Sweden with duty of £31 on a 75cl bottle as well 25% VAT. So Lotta's schnapps is liquid gold - but there's no shortage of takers. You can only take it home if you buy it in government off-licences, so the obvious course is to drink it on the premises. The vodka base is made from wheat, sugar, and water that's cooked and refined for a week until it's a brain-ticking 37.5% alcohol. Buustasup - their aquavit - has got tiny quantities of cumin, fennel, and Spey side whisky added to give it flavour. God knows what's in the sweeter Hojt that tastes a bit like Jägermeister: after the aquavit my memory started to resemble a slice of Emmental cheese.
The setting was rich in ambience, the fish stew delicious, but it was the home-grown liqueurs that took our breath and much of the rest of the day away...
Click on the link for our Åre resort report. Who says there isn't enough snow? - 31/1/2011 12:24by Peter Hardy
Who said there isn't enough snow? There's tons of the stuff here and it's been flaking it on and off all morning. Where? Sweden, of course, or - to be more precise - Åre. After all the talk of snow droughts and boilerplate pistes in the French Alps, it's been a big relief to set my edges to soft and grippy pistes in the frozen north. First I had to get myself here. Åre is in a remote spot in the snowy northern wastelands of Scandinavia. You can fly SAS via Stockholm. But - if you don't mind an early start - it's infinitely more convenient to choose the Neilson/BMI charter to little Ostersund airport, only an hour an hour away from the resort. "Early" means a 5.15am check-in at Heathrow and that for me meant leaving home at 4am. With skis and boots in tow a meet and greet service seemed essential. But the choice when you Google Heathrow parking is utterly bewildering. Airport Parking and Hotels holds the title of Best Airport Parking Company in the British Travel Awards 2010 so I thought I'd give them a whirl. They booked me in with MBW Valet Parking at a reasonable price. Outbound I couldn't fault the service. The guy was actually waiting for me on arrival and - even at 5.15am on a Sunday - he was cheerful! No problems with the Neilson flight either - apart from (as it turned out, thankfully) missing Murray v Djokovic.
If it's your first visit to Åre you're in for a cultural shock. This is not the Alps, not the Pyrenees, not Eastern Europe - it's an altogether different kind of resort and it takes a couple of hours to get into the mindset. It's in a stunningly beautiful setting along the shore of a king-sized frozen lake. Since my last visit seven years ago there's been considerable development, but I'm glad to see its charm and commercial understatement are both intact.
The centre's all pastel-painted wooden buildings discreetly lit to avoid any startling contrast with the wintry twilight outside, and ubiquitous candles both indoors and outside add a warm touch of welcome. A word of advice, though: you shouldn?t just come here to ski. You can, of course. Åre's got 46 lifts and unquestionably has the best - some would argue the only - world-class skiing in Scandinavia (it hosted the Alpine World Ski Championships in 2007 to prove it). The point is, you shouldn't get so distracted by the downhill that you miss other opportunities for wintry fun. These range from snowmobiling and dog-sledding to ice-fishing and reindeer sledding...and ice-karting. I'll let you know about that - whatever it is - later this week. This morning, though, I took a turn on the slopes. At 9.30 when the lifts opened the sun was still vainly struggling to make it above the horizon, giving the slopes a gentle golden morning glory. With 15cm of fresh snow underfoot it was pure magic. That is, until more snow began falling and the temperature starting dropping away as a reminder that it's still January here. Well, ok, I guess it's still January everywhere! But in these northern climes you need to wrap up well and catch the skiing early before the light fades.
The lifts close early at 3pm: which is the signal to head for all those other activities on offer. Apart from all the snowy stuff I alluded to above, there's the most important activity of all - party-ing. And as I discovered last night from the full-on rave being staged in my neighbouring apartment, Åre appears to be the Après Capital of the Earth. Click on the link for our Åre resort report. A trip down memory lane... - 20/1/2011 17:03by Max Hardy British Ski Cross Team athlete Max Hardy reports from Zweisimmen, in Switzerland, as he takes part in the European Cup this weekend.
Today has been a strange experience. After a ten-hour drive yesterday through the snow (just like that, the mid-April weather conditions have disappeared), we arrived in Zweisimmen, part of the Gstaad ski area. This little town holds a special place in my heart; it was here - two years ago to the day - that I made the decision to take a break from my undergraduate degree and chase the ski cross tour around the continent. What a life-changing moment that proved to be. Since then, I've spent hundreds of hours in a van travelling all over Europe, from the southern tip of Spain, to the furthest reaches of Norway, Austria, and the Czech Republic (and many more in between). I've met some extraordinary people from every skiing nation under the sun, and slept in dozens of different hotel rooms. I've become part of the British Ski Cross Team, and we're now just a week away from the World Student Games where I'll be heading out as part of the Team GB contingent. And after all that, here we are again in Zweisimmen, where it all began. Today has been a well-earned day of rest, and the snow has continued to come down in bursts for the last 24 hours. Here's hoping the light holds for course training tomorrow. With the only other ski cross competition on the planet in the next week being the X Games, every man and his dog (outside of the top 28 in the world who've been invited to Aspen) seems to have descended on Zweissimen/Gstaad for the races on Saturday and Sunday. It's been a while since I last went hell for leather down a full ski cross course, and boy am I looking forward to it.
Skiing in shorts (in January!) - 17/1/2011 22:11by Max Hardy British Ski Cross athlete Max Hardy reports from Lienz in the Austrian Tyrol, as he makes his final preparations before competing at the 2011 World Student Games in Erzurum, Turkey.
Nobody said this ski cross malarky was easy. Poor old Sammy Biilman of the Australian Development Team took a tumble in training this morning and had to be airlifted off the hill. Apparently it's not too serious (a dislocated shoulder, I'm told), and we wish her a speedy recovery.
In the meantime, boy, was it hot today. I didn't even pack my shorts! Looks like I was the only one though, as Yannick Enting of the Netherlands took the opportunity to flash some flesh, as did some of the Aussies:
Advertisement When ski cross goes wrong - 16/1/2011 22:06by Max Hardy British Ski Cross athlete Max Hardy reports from Lienz in the Austrian Tyrol, as he makes his final preparations before competing at the 2011 World Student Games in Erzurum, Turkey.
Sometimes, things don't go to plan. This lovely snap was caught on headcam right before a nasty crash. Ben (out in front) just about recovered, but I unfortunately hit the deck rather hard. Still in one piece though... Advertisement Les Sybelles - finding a family secret - 15/1/2011 22:08by Peter Hardy Our roving editor Peter Hardy is at large in the Maurienne Valley this week. Yesterday it was Les Sybelles, January 14, 2011. In a week full of surprises in the Maurienne Valley the biggest was saved for last - a collection of six little resorts linked by an astonishing 310km of piste and 72 lifts. Yet despite it being one of the largest ski areas in France precious few British families have even heard of Le Sybelles, let alone actually been there. Until yesterday it was sort of on the edge of my radar. I knew vaguely that a bunch of fairly remote villages at the Chambery end of the valley had pooled their resources and joined forces in 2003. But I had no idea of the sumptuous scale of it. Before I go any further I want to make it clear that this is not some secret Espace Killy or an alternative Chamonix that I have stumbled upon. Frankly it's not a place for expert skiers and riders and it doesn't pretend to be. This is beginner heaven and wobbly-intermediate paradise. The statistics say it all: 21 greens, 49 blues, and just seven blacks. However, as my new friend Xavier Carroz of Maurienne Hors Piste tells me: "The off-piste opportunities in Le Sybelles are absolutely outstanding." So if you're a powderhound on a family holiday, you can always sneak off for the day. Facilities for children are excellent with the complete range of all-day care and ski classes. The resorts are reached from the valley capital of St-Jean-de-Maurienne by up a winding 20km road dotted with a sequence of ancient farming villages. First you have to decide where you are going to base yourself. In ski convenience terms it doesn't much matter because they are all linked by a kind of central piste highway. From you chosen resort you take lifts up onto a plateau from where you can drop down and explore each of the others. They range in character from Sixties purpose-built to farming villages. I started by day in Les Toussuire, which is somewhere between the two: low-rise apartment blocks, but some wooden chalets as well. Being Friday, I got lucky. The farmer's market was I full swing with a huge range of local produce including of course cheeses
My guide, Jean-Baptiste from the ESF, was born here. Helene, originally from Yorkshire, has made her home in Les Toussuire with her French partner and their three children. She's proud of Les Sybelles and was determined I was going to like it. Don't worry Helene, I love it. On a weekend when the temperature soared into double figures it felt more like April than January as we raced around as much of the 310km as possible in five hours. If you manage to keep up with J-B, that's a lot. Helene took up the rear on her board - for a region with some many greens there are remarkably few flats and a high percentage of visitors were snowboarders. Only temporary problem here on my day out - as in the rest of the Alps - is the ice. In April boilerplate pistes soft during the day. In January they do not. But the rattle underfoot didn't detract from the fun. First view of Le Corbier comes a bit of a shock. How anyone back in the Sixties could have had the temerity to plonk build Tignes-style tower blocks on such a beautiful mountainside is beyond me. But the base area is limited by the terrain and I suppose if you can't build out you have to build up. Once over first impressions it's clearly a practical place to stay with immediate access to the lifts and a pleasant child-friendly front de neige. The remaining five resorts are all farming villages: St Sorlin d'Arves, St Jean d'Arves, St Colomban des Villards, Albiez Montrond, and Les Bottières. St Sorlin is attractive and has some of the best skiing, although where you stay here in important because the village sprawls for 3km.
Prices everywhere are incredibly low. You can rent a four-person apartment in low season January for as little as 200 euros. This makes Les Sybelles hugely popular with Eastern Europeans. I heard more Lithuanian and Serbian spoken on the mountain than English. At lunch on the sunny terrace of the Saint S'O above St Sorlin we were serenaded by a group of Poles who'd brought two guitars and a violin with them. Les Sybelles is ideal for a family on a budget with pre-teen kids and enjoyed at its best on a full day out when everyone has learned to ski parallel. Spag bol at lunch cost just 9 euros and a croque monsieur with chips the same. On price, combined with quality skiing, you just can't beat the Maurienne.
The sun is shining, the weather is slushy - 14/1/2011 17:17by Max Hardy British Ski Cross athlete Max Hardy reports from Lienz in the Austrian Tyrol, as he makes his final preparations before competing at the 2011 World Student Games in Erzurum, Turkey.
Today we were back in Lienz, and boy, was it hot. Temperatures hitting +5˚C at the top of the hill made for some pretty soupy conditions on the GS course we'd set, and by lunchtime we'd given up and headed for home. Yesterday was pretty uneventful- we headed back to Sillian to consolidate some of the work on the jumps from the day before, and I was pretty happy with what we achieved. We also shot some footage on the headcam whilst chasing each other over the kickers, and Marek is working on putting it all together for a short film that I'll post at the end of next week. The bad news is that Sunday's Austrian Cup race in Wildschönau has just been cancelled. They've had torrential rain pouring down in Insbruck the last couple of days, and the word on the street is that this has washed away most of the base over that way. It's a real shame, but we'll just have to shift focus to next week's European Cup race in Zweissimen, Switzerland. Tomorrow is a well-earned day off, and I'm looking forward to a lie in and lunch in Lienz town centre. With the weather how it is at the moment, I think I might have to get my flip flops out...
Advertisement Heaven Orelle - 14/1/2011 09:29by Peter Hardy Our roving editor Peter Hardy is at large in the Maurienne Valley this week. Yesterday it was Orelle, January 12, 2011.
I feel pretty chuffed with myself. On a January day when the thermometer imagined that April was already upon us I found myself skiing in Orelle, one of the highest and most snowsure resorts in the whole of Europe. With the freezing level well above 2000m it paid to aim high and we cruised all day, for the most part in glorious sunshine. With the base of the ski area at a heady 2350m and a glorious 900m vertical above it, you just couldn't go wrong. "Hang on," I hear you say, "what Orelle's this place he's talking about? Never heard of it. I happen to know that Val Thorens is the highest ski village in Europe. Now that's the place to be in this ridiculous January thaw..." Yes, I agree, and that's exactly where I was. Since 1995 when they built the gondola up from little Orelle and the Rosael chair above it, the fabulous Maurienne has been the fourth valley of the Trois Vallées.
If you're staying in Val Thorens the link to the Maurienne looks daunting in the extreme. First you have climb by cable-car or gondola up to the ridge at the very top of the ski area. The Cime de Caron lies at 3200m and the Col de Rosael is only a couple of hundred metres lower. Then you take a deep breath and chuck yourself over the other side. In fact it's nowhere near as demanding as it seems - with glorious runs down graded blue to black. But most one-week VT-based skiers don't pluck up the courage to try it until Thursday or Friday. For the first half of the week you can have the pistes virtually to yourself.
Once on the Maurienne side, two slow chair-lifts take you up to 3230m - the highest point in the whole of the Trois Vallées. Sorry, I mean the Quatre Vallées. If you're based in the Maurienne, as I am this week, the approach is rather less dramatic. Orelle is a collection of tiny hamlets perched just above the valley floor. The resort - a strong word to use - has one gondola, one ski shop, one bar, one restaurant, a post office and a quaint little tourist office. That's about it. There are no hotels. The Tourist office can find you a low-cost gite. A more comfortable and almost as low-cost choice is Les Hameaux des Eaux d'Orelle (bookable through Peak Retreats), an apartment block with spa and pool. It's situated half-a-mile above the lift station.
The higher and wonderfully picturesque hamlet of Montvillard, reached by a tortuous mountain road, is in remarkable shape. The ancient stones houses clustered around an imposing church are in such pristine condition that you wonder if you haven't stumbled on to a film set rather than into the usual tumbledown alpine community where the locals still try to eke a living from their fast-fading agrarian economy. Beyond the odd flood, avalanche, and fire, not much of note ever happened down the centuries in Orelle. Someone once wrote - and I've repeated - that Orelle is famous for its carved choir stalls. Comment? Totally untrue. The existence of two rival, but now defunct, musical societies is about as choral as it's ever got around here. There was once a barrel-making business, but these days the only carving is done on the pistes that begin a 15-minute gondola ride above the village.
The one ski school is every bit as special as I've come to expect of each new discovery in this enchanted valley this week. Maurienne Hors Piste is run by Xavier Carroz, who spent eight years powering through the powder as a member of the Head freeride team. You've seen his picture countless times. The Maurienne is recognized as being home to some of the most glorious and most demanding off-piste opportunities in France. His team of five supremely qualified mountain guides guarantee to find you the best powder in the valley. I've made a date to return and explore some of this with Xavier. But with the ridiculous double-figure temperature and avalanche risk pushing upwards from 3/5, along with the tragedy in Val still uppermost in my mind, it makes sense stay on the groomed stuff.
As I swiftly discover, Xavier does do pistes when he has to - he even teaches from beginner upwards. However, when in the company of competent skiers he only does them flat out. Even Vanessa, my other companion for the day, is stretched to keep him in sight - and she's a mountain girl, born and raised in Valmorel. On the chair-lift, I gaze up at the rugged peaks of the Maurienne while Xavier gives a ceaseless running commentary of the joys of the myriad off-piste descents that we should be enjoying today, but are not.
After what feels like the first 100 high-speed kilometers, our legs get a rest over a relaxed lunch in Val Thorens at La Fruitière - sister restaurant to the one in Val d'Isère. For a guy like me who's hooked on the Maurienne, the number of people skiing over in the TV is all a bit overwhelming - along with the prices. (pix of val Thorens lift queue) My spag bol is 17 euros. Down at the friendly Chalet Chinal Donat above Orelle it's 9.50 euros. Local sausages and polenta cost 19 euros. The previous day In Valloire I paid 11 euros. High time to get back over 'my' side of the mountain and down into the Maurienne.
To return to Orelle we have to download by gondola. Despite the warning sign stating that 'this cable-car does not go to Val Thorens,' Val Thorens-based skiers have been known to board it at the end of the day. The taxi ride home takes more than two hours. As I'm about to get into the gondola, the local avalanche dog bounds aboard in front of me and snuggles down at my feet for the 15-minute ride. A largish avalanche had just triggered naturally off to the side the piste and Salut - that's his name - has been to take a look with his pisteur master. But mercifully no skiers were in the area. Salut, Orelle. I'm coming back here.
Fresh fish and accordions in Val Cenis - 13/1/2011 08:33by Peter Hardy Our roving editor Peter Hardy is at large in the Maurienne Valley this week. Yesterday it was Val Cenis, January 12, 2011.
"We dined at Lanslebourg," wrote Michel de Montaigne. "Everywhere can be found much trout and excellent new and old wines." Not much and a lot have changed since France's foremost Renaissance philosopher popped over the Col de Cenis into this robust ski village in the Maurienne Valley and promptly tucked into what was clearly a splendid fish meal in the local auberge. True, Michel doesn't mention the spanking new six-seater Ramasse chair, or even the Turra six-pack that starts from the same spot, spanning the forest to the wide open slopes above quaint little Termignon.
But hell, it was 1581 and modern skiing was rather more than three centuries short of being discovered. However, Michel was right about the trout. Opposite the lifts in the two-star Hotel Vieille Poste they serve it appropriately with pommes à l'ancienne. Down the main street at the Hotel Do Ré, welcoming hosts Renée and Dodo (no the name's not about Julie Andrews after all) offer succulent truite à la fermière or aux amandes for just 15 uros. I'll bet that in Michel's money it cost just about the same. Fresh produce at extraordinarily low prices is a delightful daily feature of my sojourn around the slopes of the Maurienne Valley. Everywhere you look there's a little shop selling local cheeses, sausages, and amazing honey.
This is the rural France of my dreams - one that previously I felt had largely disappeared. Yes, you really can find the kind of quaint family-run restaurant like Le Sabot de Venus where recipes passed down from generation to generation originally put France on the culinary map of the world...oh, and it's got fabulous skiing, too. Val Cenis, which now formerly calls itself Val Cenis Vanoise, is one of the valleys most important resorts. It's got 125km of piste above and below the tree-line, served by 26 lifts. Cedric, my guide, took me on a lightening tour of most of it. Lightening, it was. Cedric only has one speed. He used to run Prestige Ski in Courchevel, a school that caters for the resort's wealthiest clientele including Russians with bottomless purses, and charged 800 euros a day. Here that would probably buy you a ski school. Anyway, I managed to hang on to his coat tails as we tore around wonderfully deserted pistes.
But for that, of course, you have to pay a price: during the main winter months sunshine on-piste is in limited supply and temperatures can be consequently low. March is the best month to visit. By then the sun rises sufficiently high in the sky to bring a bit of warmth to the proceedings.
There's no town of Val Cenis as such. The resort is made up of the villages of Lanslebourg, Lanslevillard, and the hamlet of Le Haut that climb up towards Bonneval at the end of the valley. The ski area is also linked from Lanslebourg to charming Termignon further down the valley. Peak Retreats features the simple but good-value apartments, Les Balcons de la Vanoise, on the edge of the slopes here. Termignon is hosting the country's top accordion festival next week. No doubt berets and even bicycles festooned with onions will be in abundance. This is real France - you get the picture?
Lanslevillard has purpose-built apartment blocks and therefore the most beds and outstanding nursery slopes served by a new six-seater chair-lift with child-safe seats and a bar that closes and opens automatically. It's a great area for complete beginners. By the end of their first week they should be able to manage the 11km Escargots green run and finish their holiday on an enormous note of achievement. But this is a resort that will satisfy every level of skier. I particularly enjoyed the mile upon mile of open high-speed cruising above the tree line. There are also a handful of stiff blacks as well as boundless high altitude off-piste.
When snow conditions are uncertain - as they are in a relatively dry winter such as this - Val Cenis is a great place in which to base yourself. The unwelcome spring-like conditions forecast across the Alps for this weekend will have little impact on the fun we're having here. More snow is needed in France at the moment. But as Montaigne famously wrote: "Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do." Soaring in Sillian - 12/1/2011 22:24by Max Hardy British Ski Cross athlete Max Hardy reports from Lienz in the Austrian Tyrol, as he makes his final preparations before competing at the 2011 World Student Games in Erzurum, Turkey.
What a difference a day makes! As the fog that's been sitting around the mountains for the past couple of days finally cleared, we decided to make the most of it with a change of scenery. A 40-minute trip down the road to Sillian - a modest ski hill near the Italian border - was the order of the day, and off we went. Driving into the car park, there's not much to look at. A rather sad-looking, grey gondola provides the only access to the mountain, and the casual passerby might be forgiven for thinking that there really isn't much to the place. What a mistake that would be, though, as what followed was one of the more glorious bluebird days in recent memory.
An almost-deserted and surprisingly large ski area was ours for the taking, with acres of perfectly-groomed motorways to practice high-speed turns and an excellent jump park for some airtime. Making use of the facilities at our disposal, most of the morning was spent taking run after run at one of the larger kickers in the park, honing the perfect aerodynamic position for Sunday's Austrian Cup race. Great fun.
Advertisement Cinderella meets Alice in Wonderland - 11/1/2011 20:25by Peter Hardy Our roving editor Peter Hardy is at large in the Maurienne Valley this week. Today it's Aussois, January 11, 2011.
I feel a bit like Cinderella around here. This afternoon I was just cruising down the last run of the day to Lanslebourg - that's part of Val Cenis - when Boiiiing! A couple of teaspoon-sized snowflakes hit my goggles. By the time I got to the car park, we were into an authentic impression of me doing a midnight runner from the Prince's palazzo. By the time I got my boots off and was in the driving seat I heard another midnight Boiiiing! I headed home to La Norma, my base for the week, just as fast as I dared on my rental car's summer tyres. Yes, you heard that right...summer tyres. Unbelievably at Chambery Airport, Gateway the Alps, none of the usual suspects including Alamo/Europcar offer winter tyres on their cars. You can request them, but they say they can't promise to deliver. Actually, they can't deliver at all. Why not say so in the first place?
Advertisement "Don't worry, I can give you a set of chains," said the smiling guy behind the desk. Anyway, it's raining outside - not snowing!" Don't worry? I'll bet he's never tried to fit chains on a mountain road in the dark in a blizzard. Rain in Chambery, you clot, means snow in the Maurienne Valley. Triple Boiiiing! The back of my Citroen Compact Something-Or-Other is playing pendulum on every serpentine upward bend during the last couples of kilometres. But I make it - and skid entirely out of control - into my parking space. I like pumpkins and even white mice. I just hate bl**dy chains. Not that I'm complaining, mind. If the snow carries on like this, we'll have a fresh half a metre overnight. If I'm to be in Valloire for breakfast, it's going to be steel links at dawn. "A false spring is on the way," warns my obviously jealous, albeit expert, snow-forecasting colleague back home by phone, "you'll be wearing shorts by the weekend."
In your dreams, son. The Maurienne can do no wrong in my eyes and quite clearly some kind of Papal dispensation with a direct line on high allows it to have it's own micro-climate. Not perfect snow conditions where you are? Sorry, but here pistes are nothing short of outstanding... oh, and it was -10C this afternoon, so don't talk to me about 'spring'! So far this week, I've visited a cluster of different resorts scattered along the mighty Maurienne Valley. I even tried to get to pretty little Bonneval-sur-Arc this afternoon, but I abandoned my attempt -because of the amount of snow on the road. You can ski off-piste with a guide to Bonneval from Val d'Isère. It's an amazing powder run. But, as I can vouch today from by car in the Maurienne, it's best to budget for the 120 euros helicopter ride back to Val.
Aussois has long been a village that I've rated - not least because it has what I consider to be the lowest-cost real skiing in the whole of Europe. By this I mean that you have to quantify the cost of your holiday and extras against the quality of the ski area. I could possibly find a lower price in Eastern Europe, but the skiing simply doesn't compare. British tour operator Peak Retreats specialises very successfully in little-known French resorts (the owner is a Frenchman) and it comes as no surprise that they feature La Norma and, of course, Aussois, in their portfolio of Maurienne Resorts. Le Flocons d'Argent apartment complex is on the edge of the piste in Aussois and has an indoor pool. For £399 in March you get a whole self-catering apartment for four to six people. Ski drive price includes FlexiPlus Eurotunnel. I mean, who can beat that?
It's an ancient village with a seventeenth-century church, perched on the sunny side of the valley. It's the kind of place where the beasts of the field live downstairs during the winter as they have done since the seventeenth century. There's even a communal village oven where everyone can bake their own when it's fired up on feast days and holidays. Frankly, January, February, and early March are the best months here. The local welcome is as warm as it gets. Tons of sunshine is also always welcome. But as winter moves to spring the snowpack doesn't necessarily agree. Like La Norma, what I genuinely didn't expect was a truly serious area for high intermediate and advanced skiers. Yes, it's great for families. But it's wonderful to find resorts - and I appear this week to be finding them on a daily basis - that suit everyone. As a strong skier, you can come here with beginner/low intermediate kids, have a great family holiday at extraordinarily low cost - and sneak off for a burn down a truly tough piste or a full day in the powder.
The scenic/animal bit is even more dramatic than I'd expected. Yes, Aussois is on the edge of the Vanoise National Park. In fact the ski boundary is 50m from the edge. "That's a white rabbit," said Benedite, my guide, pointing to tracks in the snow beneath the chair. I'm not at all sure about this. I mean, can you put your trust in a guide who's got no poles and is carrying an ABS backpack with 14kilos of safety stuff and you're not? Fortunately, I didn't fall and my guide proved not to be Alice, but a very charming pisteuse who had clearly spent so long driving a bloodwagon all a day and chucking sticks of dynamite at dawn that she didn't need any other sticks at all. The big surprise was how extensive was the ski area. Statistics say 55km, but that's a big understatement. A couple of chair-lifts takes you up from 1550m to 2750 and some extraordinary views of the valley in front and the cliff faces of the 3139m Pointe de Bellecôte behind.
There's tons of routine stuff that was made rather less routine by new snow. But the big fun is the top-to-bottom Les Balmes black. You can also ski off-piste from the top of the second chair all the way to Termignon, which is linked to Val Cenis. "It's difficult at the beginning, difficult in the middle, and difficult at the end," said my guide. Well, I like a straight talker. Is that with or without poles? If I come back to Aussois and certainly I aim to, maybe I'll give up them sticks, too. Coming next: Val Cenis.
The fog of war - 11/1/2011 19:02by Max Hardy British Ski Cross athlete Max Hardy reports from Lienz in the Austrian Tyrol, as he makes his final preparations before competing at the 2011 World Student Games in Erzurum, Turkey.
No change in the weather today - looks like the clouds are sticking around. Yesterday's snow had settled nicely this morning, leaving about 5cm of fresh for us to warm up on. It can be slightly disconcerting to ski in a white abyss, with no landmarks to indicate the incline. It's a great way to improve your awareness though, as sensations are all you have to go on. Once we were nice and warm, the rest of the morning and early afternoon was again spent pulling starts and hiking back up through the powder. It's one helluva way to keep fit!
Photo: My Slopes Advertisement Clouds and headcam fun - 10/1/2011 22:15by Max Hardy British Ski Cross athlete Max Hardy reports from Lienz in the Austrian Tyrol, as he makes his final preparations before competing at the 2011 World Student Games in Erzurum, Turkey. There was a bit of excitement around the breakfast table this morning - finally, a chance to go rippin' on the slopes. Sadly, Mother Nature had other plans, and the cloud closed in shortly after the first couple of warm-up runs and a few centimetres of fresh snow began to fall. We ended up practicing ski cross starts in the custom-built gate for the rest of the morning. A worthwhile exercise, as long as the weather clears over the next couple of days and we don't have to spend the entire fortnight practicing them. The Australian Development Ski Cross Team are also out here, so it was nice to catch up with them a run some semi-competitive, four-at-a-time start gate scenarios. Luckily, we did get a chance to test out Marek's new Christmas present - a Drift headcam. We're planning to cut together something really great with all the footage we'll get over the next couple of weeks. A big thank you to the kind folks from Visit Tirol and the resort we're staying in, Lienz. They've been kind enough to supply me with a liftpass for the next few days to help with training, which I'm really grateful for. Madness in the Maurienne - 10/1/2011 21:26by Peter Hardy Our roving editor Peter Hardy is at large in the Maurienne Valley this week. His first stop: La Norma, January 10, 2011.
I've fallen in love. I've only been here 24 hours and I've tumbled head over heels - fortunately not literally - for enchanting La Norma and sunny Aussois, her more experienced playmate across the valley. My heart's going bumpety-bump and I've got a whole batch of butterflies hatching in my stomach. I want to live here, a concept that is not as completely barmy as it seems because you can buy a cool three-room apartment in the region for £60,000. Indeed, if you have the necessary, you can buy a massive chalet with a rental flat underneath for £650,000. In Val d'Isère Put a 4 in front of that figure. In Courchevel, make it a 6. This is real rural France with great food, welcoming locals, low prices, and reliable snow.
What, you may well ask, is he talking about? OK. La Norma is not, in this instance, the long-suffering wife of former British Prime Minister John Major, but an intriguing purpose-built resort in the French Maurienne Valley. Very few people in Britain have ever heard of it and the location of Aussois on any world ski map would test the best. Yet both, along with the other ski villages of the Maurienne are incredibly easy to reach. If you've bashed pistes in Val Thorens or in Val d'Isère you've already skied unwittingly within a couple of miles of them - as the alpine chough flies. The Maurienne is the neighbouring valley to the Tarentaise which houses Moûtiers, Bourg-St-Maurice, The Trois Vallées, a host of other big name resorts along with much the largest slice of the British seasonal skiing cake each winter.
Advertisement Train travel is sweet and eco. The TGV from Paris takes four hours and stops in the valley town of Modane, which is just a 10-minute taxi ride away. The biggest airport hub is Geneva, but those in the know fly to Chambery which is just a 90-minute drive from La Norma. Well, it should be. On Sunday I flew from Gatwick to Chambery with Snowjet, a long-established low-cost ski airline which I'd never before tried. Actually, I'm not sure I want to tell anyone about this. I think it's a winner. £140 return is a positive bargain these days, but service is almost as important as price. On arrival at Gatwick the queue for Ryanair was horrendous. But neighbouring Titan Airways which owns Snowjet took just three minutes to check me in. Snowjet couldn't have been more professional with sensibly priced in-flight drinks and snacks. The other end was, of course, quite another matter. Russian Christmas Day, in case you have forgotten, was on Friday, January 7. Chambery airport was so overwhelmed by hungover homeward-bound Russians that we had to wait on the plane before joining the Moscovite rush hour in the arrivals lounge. And it was pouring with rain, a downpour so monsoonly insistent that drivers were pulling over on the autoroute. But raindrops falling on your head at valley level are mostly a skier's dream - unless you happened to have been in France last week when it was wet at 3000m and above! By morning La Norma had 30 fresh cm on top and even a welcome dusting at 1350m resort level.
"Meet me in Le Grenier, the village bakery, for breakfast," emailed Veronick, my guide, "La Norma is small - you won't have any trouble finding it!" She was right. La Norma is more reminiscent of a small Canadian resort rather then a French purpose-built station de ski. Given that it's 40 years old, it blends remarkably well into the dramatic scenery of the Maurienne.
No big barrack-like concrete blocks here but mainly wood-clad apartment buildings and a smattering of chalets clustered around a front de neige with a small selection of shops, restaurants, and bars. It's traffic free and extremely child-friendly, with a crèche that takes children from three months and a good nursery slope. A gondola and a chair provide mountain access to a 65km ski area that is full of surprises. La Norma calls itself La Station Cosy. While I'm not quite sure what this anglo-style affront to the French language really means, it probably implies that this is the no-fuss and intimate family resort that it is. However, this fails to tell me that the skiing here is also, for anyone who wants it, full on.
Within 20 minutes of leaving breakfast, Veronick was poised on the lip of a stomach-churning couloir of Chamonix pedigree at 2750m called ... er ... Le Couloir... that was blanketed in 30cm of overnight snow. Only an avalanche warning of 3/5 pulled us back from the lip. We settled instead for a much less vertiginous west-facing bowl that had been both Gazex-ed and bombed by the ski patrol. For a family resort, this was phenomenal skiing with tons of off-piste down into the treeline. On the north-facing side of the ski area, the Col de Pelouse offers more challenges before descending to the aptly-named Plateau de la Repose. It has lots of blues and the mighty green Ste Anne that winds its way across the full width of the mountain and all the way down to the resort. If you can complete that at the end of your first week on snow, you'll be hooked for life.
Perhaps the second biggest surprise of all is the absence of other skiers - not just this week but, I am assured, all season. Queues don't exist - not even at New Year. The area can cope with at least 7,000 per day but there's half that number of beds and many of them are privately owned and not available for rental. So what the biggest surprise? The prices. For anyone who normally skis over the hill in the Tarentaise these come as a welcoming shock. Imagine a world where a pizza for lunch in a French ski resort cost 10 euros, a fondue 15 euros and you can wash it down with 0.50lt pitcher of decent wine for 5.50 euros or a beer for 4 euros.
In the supermarket prices are the same as in any valley town - with no mark-up for altitude. Try buying a bottle of plonk for 3 euros or even a good bottle of Bordeaux for 7 euros over the hill in the Tarentaise! Oh, and a six-day lift pass is 127 euros. Some 90% of La Norma's visitors are French, attracted by both the prices and the uncommercial ambience of the place. A smattering of Dutch and Belgians add international appeal but I didn't hear English spoken anywhere today. Mostly I didn't hear any language spoken because I was alone with a guide in the wilds of unspoilt Maurienne. I like that. Actually, I just love that.
Reasons why Austria is better than the UK - 9/1/2011 21:57by Max Hardy British Ski Cross athlete Max Hardy reports from Lienz, Austria, as he makes his final preparations before competing at the 2011 World Student Games in Erzurum, Turkey.
Some 25 hours later (including a rather uncomfortable five-hour roadside nap), and we've just arrived in Lienz in the Tyrol for two weeks of ski cross training. Lienz isn't a well-known spot to British skiers, but we love it here, and here's one reason why: Just minutes ago, a local police officer pulled us over as we entered the town (we'd been doing 60km/h in a 50 zone - oops). After the necessary exchange of registration details and a lovely chat about skiing, Ian produces the 25 euro on-the-spot fine. But our new-found law-enforcing friend is delighted to hear about our ski racing folly and, smiling, offers 15 of our euros back to us. "We say only ten euros this time. Fifteen back for the first beers. Have a good stay in Lienz!" What lovely people (our hotel is smashing too - more on that at a later date). I wonder if Austrian visitors to our shores back home get the same treatment from our bobbies? Hmmm. Bye bye, Britain - 8/1/2011 11:55by Max Hardy British Ski Cross athlete Max Hardy heads to the mountains as he makes his final preparations before competing at the 2011 World Student Games in Erzurum, Turkey.
Well, off we go. A quick trip down the road to the home of my coach, Ian Findlay, where we'll load all the gear from my little Clio (pictured) into his Subaru and pick up fellow team member Marek Benke. And then there's the small matter of driving from the south coast of the UK to the Osttirol in Austria with roughly one metric tonne of luggage crammed into the car. Should be fun... Sun, snow and sadness - 29/12/2010 17:01by Peter Hardy After Christmas in Val d'Isère, editor Peter Hardy points his borrowed BMW X3 towards Normandy and Hampshire.
Christmas Eve in Val Advertisement It's been a very special Christmas in Val, tinged with tragedy on Boxing Day. It was our 14th consecutive family trip there, a fact that must say something about Val or us - or both. Never have I seen the resort or the mountain look in such good shape, with 60cm of snow falling during the course of the week. Getting there via Portsmouth-Caen with Brittany Ferries at the wheel of the new BMW X3 proved a doddle, despite some of the most challenging driving conditions I've ever experienced. Boutique chalet operator Fish & Pips, new to Val this year, did us proud. What separates them from most of their 50-strong pack is the quality of their cuisine coupled with a willingness to go the extra mile in terms of service. Thumbs up from me. The fresh snow and bitterly cold temperatures produced some superb skiing conditions both on and off piste. But when we arrived at a small party given by locals on Boxing Day night we were greeted by long faces. A British couple, skiing off-piste with enormously experienced Canadian ski guide, Wayne Watson of Alpine Experience, were caught in an avalanche. Chrissy Robinson managed to pull the lever on her ABS. Her 67-year-old husband David did not, and was buried.
Off-piste guide, Wayne Watson Wayne and a third client found him with their transceivers within 30 minutes. He was airlifted to hospital in Grenoble, but later died. Wayne has taught off-piste skiing for 30 years. What was immediately clear is that he followed all the rules and didn't take any unnecessary risks. His fellow guides all agree that he did nothing wrong. But just sometimes the mountain breaks those rules. The avalanche spontaneously released well above the party of skiers on the Combe du Signal at Le Fornet. As another of Wayne's clients put it: "We all know the risks, but we hope it will never happen. Sometimes it does and it's now more to do with how we cope rather than dwelling on the event."
Ready to depart On that reflective note it was time to head for home. There's no doubt that the new BMW X3 is a great car on snow. After half an hour of digging it out of the car park, it started immediately. It's just a pity that the same summit level of German precision engineering did not apparently go into the construction of the ski box. Guys, did no one actually test it in action? In -15C the little key stuck firmly in the lock and no amount of de-icer or even a lighted match would free the mechanism. Fortunately it jammed open. Fortunately, I managed to borrow a couple of bike retaining straps. If the car has an electronic lock, why can't the ski box? I don't know who actually made it - possibly not BMW themselves - but it looked to me, as I cussed and swore gloveless in the cold for an hour, that this sort of frail mechanical locking mechanism hadn't advanced in 20 years.
Goodbye Val But the car itself, I have to say, was a dream. With Max my co-driver we cruised effortlessly the 1000km to the Normandy coast in an easy nine-and-a-half hours. What's more, we had used just one tank of diesel along the way. The outside temperature never rose above freezing. We had snow on the bonnet when we left, and still some left when we reached Caen!
Caen, and still carrying the snow with us 'Slightly choppy' was the mid-Channel forecast as we boarded Brittany Ferries' Mont St Michel. But that didn't worry me at all. After a quick steak and a well-earned bottle of Bordeaux we crashed out in cabin for a full seven hours. By morning, the snow was gone from bonnet. Oh, and that blasted key turned in the lock. I have to say that Portsmouth Gare Maritime in the pre-dawn light of a foggy and drizzly tail end day of the year is not as inviting as Val d'Isère. But hell, Hampshire's home isn't it?
Portsmouth at 6.30am Click on the link for our Val d'Isère resort report. Christmas in Val d'Isère - 24/12/2010 20:50by Peter Hardy
Ho, Ho! What do you want for Christmas in Val d'Isère?
30cm of fine, light powder...how about half a metre - and counting! Left to right: Colin Tanner, Barney Hardy and Max Hardy.
Crikey, we're drowning in the stuff! Christmas Eve turned out to be the best day of winter so far...heli-ski conditions without the need for a helicopter.
Here's Colin Tanner of TDC Ski powering his way through the trees just off the Matisse piste. TDC is ten years old this winter and has firmly established itself as one of the most important ski schools in Val. Photo by Max Hardy.
Oh look ! Here's my son Barney doing just the same.
Look at my BMW X3 enjoying the powder outside Fish & Pips Chalet Santons Solaise.
Val d'Isère this evening Way to go...BMW (Bl**dy Marvellous Wagon) - 21/12/2010 08:28by Peter Hardy Peter Hardy continues his snowbound Christmas journey to the Alps. When Captain Oates famously stepped outside his tent in Antarctica saying: "I may be some time", weather conditions could not have been much worse than those that greeted us in Caen. It was certainly going to take that - and some - to reach Val d'Isère as we drove up the ramp of Brittany Ferries good ship Normandie before dawn on Sunday.
Another car en route Our fellow drivers slithered up the iced-up exit ramp, took one look at the weather and then another at each other in shared disbelief. Driving on the right across Europe is one thing, driving in the teeth of the howling blizzard sweeping in from the Atlantic would be quite another. Six inches of perfect powder had already settled on the motorway and the depth seemed certain to double before breakfast. Not a snowplough in site. Time to get the hell out of here - if we can. And we can. Thanks to our 4x4 completely winterized BMW X3 we quickly discover that we go anywhere we damn well please! While other drivers huddled in the terminal car park contemplating whether it was really possible to drive with snow chains at 20MPH all the way from Channel to Chalet, I put my foot down. The manufacturers claimed, somewhat arrogantly I thought, that this is the best car for driving on snow that has ever been built. After 10 hours behind the wheel in the most severe driving conditions imaginable, I now know that the claim is entirely justified.
As we left the port I smoothly shifted through the six gears and eased my way onto the N814 and the A13. Rather too smoothly, as it turned out. I must be the only driver in Northern Europe to have been flashed by a speed camera that morning. Let's hope the blizzard blocked the licence plate. Driving to Val via Portsmouth and Caen instead of Folkestone or Dover and Calais sounds like a long way round. In fact, in mileage terms (if you don't count the sea crossing) the distance is shorter - 654 against 687. What I hadn't banked on was Normandy being hit by what someone said was the heaviest snowfall in Northern France in two generations. But no worries. While other cars crawled at a snail's pace in the slow lane, we took the A3 off-piste in the unploughed fast lane. Yes, we did have bleepers, probes, and a couple of foldaway shovels in the boot. Incredibly, in up to six inches of fresh snow, it was possible to maintain a speed of 50-60MPH and to feel absolutely secure of traction on all four wheels. Touching the brake in such conditions on summer tyres and without 4x4 would have been suicidal. But with the A3 you could come to halt with hardly a trace of a skid in not much more than normal stopping distance. The only other guy to try and take us on for a five-mile stretch south of Paris was the driver of a Land Rover. He must have used every trick in the rally-driving handbook to valiantly cling to our tail during a tricky bit between motorways. But once we hit the next toll road we left him for dust...I mean, snow. Sorry mate, you were completely outclassed.
At a service station somewhere off the autoroute in Burgundy South of Paris, when joined the A6 Autoroute du Soleil, the blizzard ceased. We passed through snow-covered countryside all the way to our destination, but the rest of the journey was on dry roads until the final climb up from Bourg-St-Maurice to Val. We cruised along comfortably on the edge of the 80mph speed limit. We averaged a pretty cool 31.6mpg and we only needed one French fuel stop for a tank load of diesel -at £1.16 a litre it's cheaper than at home. We cruised up the hill to Val from Bourg-St-Maurice less than 11 hours after leaving Caen, and only an hour behind schedule because of the weather. I doubt there's a driver, plane, or passenger to the Alps who could equal our record last weekend. Bl**dy Marvellous Wagon, that X3. Driving with the X Factor - 20/12/2010 08:51by Peter Hardy
Leaving home Sometimes, guys, you just get lucky. I feel, rather smugly, like I've just won a triple rollover and I can't wipe the grin off my face. I suspect I'm the only person around today who's actually revelling in the worst driving conditions across Europe for 25 years. More snow and ice? Bring it on. Forget snowbound airports and head to Portsmouth. Thanks to the partnership of Brittany Ferries and BMW, I'm not sitting stranded at an airport wondering where I'm going to spend Christmas, I'm in Val d'Isere spot on schedule this morning...and waiting for the first lift. "We think that the new X3 is best car ever built for driving on snow," said The Man From BMW back in October, "Take it out to the Alps for Christmas and test it yourself." Outside my window the sun was shining on the green fields of Hampshire. "When do you want it delivered? Weekend of December 18?" Of course, neither of us on that balmy autumnal day had any idea what Mother - hell, bitter old Father - Nature was going to chuck at us in England this weekend, let alone the Alps. The car arrived on Friday afternoon. Saturday, 08.00 When I awoke and looked out of the window the lawn was buried in a blanket of snow. I knew from experience that our narrow, steep lane would be impassable. But wait...is that the Batmobile or what parked in the driveway? I must confess that before I got behind the wheel, I knew a bit about what was in store. Last month I flew to Austria to try out the X3 on the glacier at Sölden. But never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would be putting it through its paces in heavy snow at home. 11.00 The mid-morning drive into Newbury for a last minute bit of festive shopping was a doddle to the point of actually being a bit embarrassing. While other drivers slipped and slithered at walking pace, I cruised along at 50mph with the same secure traction as on a dry road. The secret to this lies not just in the permanent 4x4 drive and variable suspension, but in winter tyres. BMW even supplied me with chains. In France as in most alpine countries it is the law to carry them in winter. But I cannot imagine a situation where fitting them would ever be necessary. If you're the fist-shaking owner of the blue Vauxhall got stuck on the hill near Highclere on the A343, my apologies for drenching you in snow as I effortlessly powered by...couldn't help myself. 22.00
The 45-minute drive to Portsmouth was effortless. My ski-racing son Max took the wheel and rolled us onto Brittany Ferry's Normandie for the overnight crossing to Caen. A couple of fellow passengers who'd driven from Durham looked exhausted. They said they'd driven south in conditions that were 'nothing short of appalling'. Fortunately, what they didn't know as we made our way to our respective cabins was that by dawn the word would have been redefined.
Loading the car onto the ferry Sunday, 05.45 The ferry is a great way to travel - provided that you get your head down as soon as you get on board. Our twin berth en-suite cabin had sea views and a small sitting area with TV. Making use of the latter would have been a mistake: Reveille at 05.45 is actually 04.45. We've an hour to breakfast and rejoin the X3 as the bow doors open bang on time at 06.45.
In the ferry cabin What greets us is...a howling blizzard. The driver of the Ford Transit van just ahead of us got stuck on the Normandie's iced-up exit ramp. I've spent much of my long life driving on snow, but what lies ahead are the most challenging conditions I have ever experienced. Read tomorrow about Peter's epic journey across Northern France. Shivering and shovelling in St Anton - 11/12/2010 10:13by Peter Hardy
Scott Dunn staff shovelling snow at Chalet Artemis this morning. Brrrr it's cold and snowy here today - the thermometer's fallen to -16C up on the mountain and with wind chill that's a Jack Frost of -24C. Still, if the forecast is to be fully believed, that's positively Mediterranean in the context of what's in store for holidaymakers arriving this weekend. On the plus side they are greeted by half a metre of fresh powder adorning the town. The minus side is a big one: on Monday night the mercury is set to plunge to an Arctic -26C! Skiing? Me? Morning-only in the powder, lazy lunch in the newly rebuilt Rodler Alm and then a long chilled après-ski to live music in The Underground. St Anton's iconic nite-spot is relocated this winter to the charismatic Museum building. Back at Chalet Artemis, Scott Dunn staff are still shovelling. For further information on Chalet Artemis, contact Scott Dunn, and for more information on the resort go to our St Anton resort report.
Snowbound in St Anton - 10/12/2010 09:12by Peter Hardy
Statue of Artemis in falling snow last night I am, I think, in St Anton. This has got to be Happy Valley, but today there's more a grimace than a smile about the mountain. Indeed, with the wind chill factor at -19C in the teeth of a howling blizzard and visibility down to almost zero, this could well be a remake of Scott's trek to the South Pole. Oh well, look on the bright side - last week I skied in -29C on the Grande Motte in Tignes. Any snow? Yeah, tons of the stuff. But you have to feel it rather than see it. In truly challenging conditions such as this, lunch looms even larger than ever. No pilgrim of old crossing the Arlberg Pass was ever as happy to see the outline of the Hospiz Alm at St Christoph emerge from the whiteout.
Tiroler Gröstl at the Hospiz Alm One of the world's greatest mountain restaurants lived up to its reputation. A giant platter of Tiroler Gröstl - hash browns with bacon and fried eggs - along with a full cow's worth of spare ribs soon got us back on track. Best to go easy on the wine - if you've got the cash, it's easy to get carried away at the Hospiz Alm. The cellar, reached by a helter-skelter slide, houses one of the world's greatest and most expensive large bottle collections of Claret. When I say 'large bottle' I'm not kidding. A Melchior of Chateau Cheval Blanc 2000 holds 18 litres - 24 normal bottles. And when I say 'expensive' I'm also not kidding. Last year a German skier paid 47,000 euros for this one. Actually, it's been a pretty good buy. It's now worth 51,000 euros and he has yet to drink a drop of it.
One of the rooms of wine cellar under the Hospiz Alm We settle for a couple of rather more modest bottles. It's almost with relief that we discover the chair-lift has closed because of the weather and we have to travel by road back home to St Anton. Home this week is Chalet Artemis, Scott Dunn's contemporary Austrian flagship, which is refreshingly far removed from the Heidi chalet of old. It is a funky hexagonal box on four floors. On the terrace outside the sitting rooms is a seven-foot statue of the Ancient Greek goddess of both hills and virginity. Inside are six very individual bedrooms with gorgeous views, and there's a fabulous wellness area.
Dining table in Chalet Artemis For further information on Chalet Artemis, contact Scott Dunn, and for more information on the resort go to our St Anton resort report.
Left to right: Editor Peter Hardy, Andrew Dunn of Scott Dunn, Editor Felice Hardy - in St Anton yesterday. Testing weather conditions - 3/12/2010 18:25by Peter Hardy
I've done an amateur bit against the clock in my time. So racing at 40mph on a GS course on an Austrian glacier shouldn't have been too testing an experience - even in flat light and a temperature of 20C. Trouble was I wasn't on skis, but in a car. Admittedly it wasn't just any old car but the brand new BMW X3 which is billed as the ultimate hatchback on snow. The idea was to drive it out to Val d'Isere, crossing the Channel with Brittany Ferries to Normandy, and arriving in Val d'Isere for Christmas. That still is the idea - and later this month I'll be giving you my personal day-by-day account of my drive to the Alps. "But first you might benefit from a little tuition from our alpine driving experts on how to handle the X3 on snow," said the Man from BMW. Cheek of it, but he was most certainly right.
All of which is how I come to find myself running bollard gates on a flattish bit of mountainside up above a very snowy Sölden. The X3 unsurprisingly doesn't have race-prepared 88° edges. So it's quite remarkable to me that the winter tyres find enough purchase to stop the back swinging completely around and slapping the wall of snow on my left. I actually feel I'm in control and each consecutive lap time is just a little bit faster. Glancing to my left I can't help but I feel that Louise, my vastly more experienced petrol-head co-driver, does not share confidence. Did you know that 48 per cent of car accidents in the UK result from skidding? Judging from the palour of her complexion as I approached the chicane, Louise did. But the real challenge for the X3 on the glacier was off-piste. As we headed out away from the mountain road and on to the raw glacier itself it seemed sensible to let my co-rider take the reins. Up - or down slopes of 60°the car did a very passable imitation of a go-anywhere alpine military tank. Sölden is on the shortlist for where Hannibal crossed the Alps back in 218BC and fought his way to the gates to Rome. If he'd had the chance to swap his war elephants for a troop of X3s he'd have driven right up to the steps of the senate and taken control of the empire. Down the years I've driven scores of cars on snow. None of them handle as well as the new BMW. But there's a lot more to driving to the Alps for a family holiday than performance on or off road. Motorway cruising, fuel consumption, comfort, and Channel crossings all play their part. From December 19, Welove2ski be putting the X3 to the real ski test.
Zermatt climbs to a new high - 22/8/2010 13:00by Peter Hardy Two of our editors have been exploring Zermatt out-of-season. Here's what they found there last week:
On high at the Treetops Fun Park - with one foot on the Matterhorn Peter: I didn't really intend to go skiing, I was all set for a summer hike. But when you wake in Zermatt to a glorious blue-sky August day and the Matterhorn's wearing her wedding dress. Well, you don't really have a choice, do you? "There's been 20cm overnight up on Plateau Rosa - on top of the 80cm we've had in the past week," Donald, my host from Mountain Exposure, calmly informs me over the croissants. That's it, then. A large group of Japanese tourists wearing shorts look on in bemusement as in full winter gear we clomp at speed for the Matterhorn Express. The delightful main street is crowded. Zermatt has a ten-month tourist season. It actually attracts more visitors in summer than it does in winter.
Zermatt's summer ski area I must confess that the glacier is not my favourite summer ski area - lack of gradient and inconvenience of access push it down the list below Hintertux, Tignes, Stubai, and Saas Fee. However the new link to the lift system at Furgg has hugely improved access. You climb into a gondola at resort level and change only at Trockener Steg for the final cable-car assault on the Klein Matterhorn. Zero degrees, fresh snow underfoot and a blue sky overhead - it looked and felt more like March than April! On a perfect day like this, there's a deliciously wicked quality to skiing in summer - at this time of year you just shouldn't be having so much fun! The snow's at its best from 10am to midday. But when we headed down again after a couple of full-on hours the quality was still remarkably good. However we had other fish to fry. Zermatt has some of the finest mountain restaurants in the world. On the way back we abandoned our skiers at Furi and hiked down to the ancient farming hamlet of Zum See for a glorious al fresco lunch cooked by Max and served by Greti. Octopus carpaccio followed by calves' liver Rösti washed down with a crisp sauvignon blanc and a delicate red from the Valais. Yes, as I was saying, Zermatt unquestionably has the best summer skiing in the world. Felice: Zermatt's sumptuous hotels are so smart and so Swiss they sometimes border on the clinical. Big money can buy you great comfort, but, with one or two lone exceptions, what Zermatt has always lacked is that delicious type of five-star chalet you can find in Courchevel, Val d'Isère and Verbier. So I was genuinely gobsmacked last week to find a British-run company - Mountain Exposure - with not just one but 30 uber-luxury chalets, both catered and uncatered. Their eclectic styles include cosy wooden apartments like Chalet Heidi, where I stayed for two nights. It's a sweet little self-catered chalet for six, set in a side street across the road from the church. It's perfect for a family, everything is clad in ancient wood and the living area has a wood-burning stove and a dining table made from an old plough.
Breakfast at The Heinz Julen Loft More dramatic is The Heinz Julen Loft, a confection of glass and concrete built by one of Switzerland's most celebrated and bizarre designers of the same name, who comes from Zermatt. It's perched on a cliff top. Reached by its own elevator built into the rock, it certainly is the most unusual chalet I've ever come across anywhere in the Alps...or anywhere else. Robbie Williams - a portrait by his friend Julen hangs on the wall - is just one of the many celebrities to have stayed here. The floor-to-ceiling windows are vast and, to let in even more light, the electrically-operated (weatherproof!) curtains are on the outside of the building and work at the click of a switch.
The Robbie Williams portrait that hangs in the chalet There's a giant illuminated glass dining table suspended from hooks on the ceiling - it's cranked down when needed. The floors and walls are unfinished concrete and the chairs are made from the sort of wood-and-metal boxes used by rock bands to transport musical instruments when on tour. The living area makes the perfect party space. Oh, and don't forget to bring your own sheet music - there's a grand piano for playing Angels.
The Zermatt Lodge But my favourite chalet is The Zermatt Lodge, a fabulous penthouse apartment. It has a gorgeous sitting room with a central suspended fireplace surrounded by cowskin stools. There's a sauna and an outdoor hot tub on the terrace. The five bedrooms are huge, in fact there's so much space you really can spread out. But what unites all the chalets is the wonderful food - rather better than in any five-star hotel here. Staff this winter include the head chef from a Michelin-starred restaurant who's love of skiing has led him to take a career break. All that light and space turned out to be the theme of my trip - with the highlight a morning's paragliding. I have to say that DIY flying is not my usual sort of thing, Even when the instructor up at Rothorn assured me that a child of two had flown in tandem, I was almost sick with fear before setting off. I was given a windproof one-piece suit, helmet and fleece gloves to wear and was then harnessed in and firmly strapped to my guide, Phil from Alpine Adventures Zermatt. Together we ran in the ankle-deep summer snow to the edge of the slope and out into the blue sky.
Felice and Phil flying above Zermatt. Photo: Alpine Adventures Zermatt We drifted down to the valley with the Matterhorn as backdrop and the town spread out below us. It was blissful and relaxing, even setting down at the end of the flight was smoother than I'd ever have believed possible. Sick? I felt elated - and hungry. Fortunately Zermatt always provides the answer. A 30-minute hike down from Sunnegga took us to the ancient gastro-hamlet of Findeln and the culinary delights of Chez Vrony. The farmhouse was the family home of Heinz Julen - Vrony is his sister. The house may now be one of Zermatt's most acclaimed mountain restaurants, but Vrony still supervises the cheese-making in the little cellar dug into the mountainside.
Vrony with Donald Scott of Mountain Exposure, in the restaurant's wine (and cheese) cellar For me it was a toss-up between the poached duck liver with Rösti or Vrony's exquisite burger from beef grazing outside the door. Zermatt's full of such deliciously difficult decisions: Where to stay, where to eat, and then there's The Treetops Fun Park if you want something really different. Mountain Exposure seems rather cleverly, to understand that. For further information see our Zermatt Resort Review. Let battle commence... - 11/5/2010 15:26by Peter Hardy Competition is hotting up between Britain's biggest ski companies. Welove2ski's editors reflect on what it means for their customers.
Seen the news today? One of Britain's biggest ski companies has bought two much smaller rivals - and in the process, it's been taken over by the management team of its new purchases. (Read the story here.) This fact alone makes it a fascinating story. But what really matters is the fact that Andy Perrin, the new CEO of Hotelplan UK, and Peter Dyer, the new Vice-Chairman, were the team that built Crystal, Britain's biggest ski travel brand. Crystal (now part of TUI) is their main rival - and we can expect intense competition between the two companies as they struggle for domination of the British market. What does this mean for the consumer and the rest of the industry? Here's how it looks to us: 1. Cheaper holidays. In the short term the clash between Inghams/Interhome/Total/Esprit and Crystal/Thomson/First Choice should mean we'll be spending less on our holidays. We're not talking about a return to the wonderfully low prices of the early noughties when sterling was king. But both groups have considerable leverage when it comes to negotiating contracts with hotels, apartments and chalets. And both can take advantage of economies of scale. Some (but not all) of these benefits will be passed on to consumers as they compete for our business. 2. More deals and more imaginative pricing. We saw this from Crystal last season, with its all-in-one Ski+ offers and Wipeout sale, and we expect similar innovations from Hotelplan UK. After all, its new CEO has a history of aggressive discounting - selling half-price chalet holidays at Ski Total in the darkest days of the recession in 2008. 3. Pressure on medium-sized tour operators. Many smaller rivals will find it hard to compete with the big boys' negotiating power, pricing levels and last-minute discounting next season. So they'll need to redouble their efforts to define themselves as the real ski specialists - companies staffed by people with an intimate knowledge of each of their properties, who know their resorts inside out and can add an extra dimension to a ski holiday as a result. 4. Andy Perrin to join a Lib-Dem/Conservative coalition as Secretary of State for Snow before selling Hotelplan UK to Harrods, taking over both parties before the autumn and becoming Prime Minister...or something. Frankly, after the Hotelplan deal anything looks possible... As for who's going to win this upcoming Clash of the Titans, well, it's anyone's guess. The Inghams/Interhome/Esprit/Total coalition is the smaller, more manoeuvrable force equipped with light cavalry that can skirmish and attack at will. Crystal has First Choice and Thomson - big guns, with lots of ammunition, that can help keep the enemy advance in check. Its weakness is the similarity of its three brands which General Perrin will seek to exploit. The British ski industry - just like British politics - has just got more interesting! Massive snow in Snowmass - 7/4/2010 04:39by Peter Hardy Two Welove2ski editors expected warm sunshine and sorbet snow conditions when they headed off to Aspen in April. How wrong can you get. "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes, that's what we say in Colorado," said Campbell, our back country guide. Yes, I know they say that in Whistler. But he's been working there too, so forgive the guy. Actually, I can forgive just about anything of anyone who skis powder as dynamically as he does.
The past 36 hours we've had rattling frozen slush and beautiful packed pistes. These were followed by a giant dust storm that blew in from the desert, turning the whole mountain brown. The locals shook their heads in dismay - the closing days next weekend looked doomed. Then, overnight came the snow - and I MEAN snow. Giant soup-plate flakes set us up for one the best days of the entire season. When we met up at 8am, Campbell just couldn't stop grinning. He was still grinning when the lifts closed and he was finally forced to dismount from his 111mm-under-the-foot Volkl Katanas. I've never skied such perfect powder in April and in the final week of what's otherwise been a pretty dry season here in scrumptious Snowmass. April? It looked and felt like mid-January today with the thermometer at - 15C and 20cm of fresh powder underfoot. Almost nobody was out there and we virtually had the entire mountain to ourselves. If you thought Snowmass was a place where you went for a cruise on the days when you want to give Ajax and Highlands a rest, you'd be wrong. You'd be very, very wrong.
We rate Snowmass as one of the top five ski mountains in North America - and now with its smart new base area it's developed into a real resort in its own right. No longer is it Aspen's family-oriented little sister. It's come of age. Highlight is the brand new ski in, ski out Viceroy Snowmass where we're staying. Its spa has some of the most unusual treatments we've ever come across (a Bear Dance Ritual and other Ute-inspired treatments)and there's an outdoor area with lovely heated swimming-pool, two hots tubs and two open fires next to them. There's more snow forecast for tonight - Campbell's waxing his extra-wide Volkl Kuros. It seems that here in Colorado they've saved the best for last...and invited us to join in the fun. We're not complaining.
Click on the link for our Aspen resort report A Heavenly visit - 22/3/2010 08:01by Peter Hardy Reporting on the latest snow in Heavenly - 22 March, 2010 To fly for 11 hours and then drive for a further four it's got to be a very special ski resort. Only in the last half an hour of the 24 that have passed since leaving home do you have any indication that you might be in for an epic downhill experience. A few patches of white beside the road, as you come over the pass on the road from San Francisco and down to the second largest alpine lake in the world, suggest that dragging my Salomon Lords all the way from Heathrow might not have been in vain. Virgin Atlantic is one of that select band of skier-friendly airlines that don't charge for carrying equipment.
This week I've missed out of the half metre of fresh powder that fell here ten days ago but the trails and bowls are in near perfect packed condition. Long runs cut through the forest of red fir provide a high speed playground for intermediates and above. Two of my party who were ski virgins are able after only two days of lessons to start hesitantly exploring the mountain beyond the nursery slopes. Such snow and sunshine make it a great place for beginners. My visit coincides with the annual Spring Break holiday season but the longest queue on the main hub lifts lasts barely five minutes and much of the ski area is nearly empty. Recession here, like everywhere else in America, is taking its toll on business..
Property prices along the lake are traditionally some of the highest in the country but, even at the top of the market, takers are scarce and they can name their own prices. A ten-bedroomed mansion with its own beach is officially on the market for $100 million, but over dinner the estate agent handling the sale assured me that any offer over $60 million would be accepted. On a more realistic scale a $300,000 apartment can now be bought for $200,000.
This picture is of a fake fireplace in the Embassy Suites where I stayed: a TV set with a picture of burning logs and, amazingly, people sit around it. By night the casinos beckon. You don't have to gamble to enjoy yourself - watching other people do it is fun in itself. If I had a full week I'd ski a day each in other Tahoe resorts such as Squaw Valley, Northstar, Kirkwood, and Alpine Meadows. But sadly, I don't. I've got to fly all the way home again. Still, it's been Heavenly. Click here for our Heavenly resort report. Prada and Dirndls in St Moritz - 2/3/2010 18:13by Peter Hardy Editor Peter Hardy reports on the skiing in St Moritz - March 2, 2010 The devil, it seems, does not wear Prada. But ski instructors do - if they work for the Suvretta Ski School in St Moritz. Their smart blue uniform is one of only three other schools in the world that is tailored by the exclusive Italian designer (the others are Megeve and Cortina d'Ampezzo).
Probably you'd expect nothing less of the best ski school in the most famous ski resort in the world. But all that fame is proving a bit of a problem in these troubled financial times. St Moritz is a victim of its own success. When you spent rather more than a century building a brand that settles seamlessly into the same sentence as Rolls Royce, Krug, Rolex, and - indeed - Prada, it's difficult to face the recession question: How can it appeal to a wider audience? The fact is that St Moritz is not just about the Cresta and bobsleigh along with polo, horse racing, golf and even cricket on the frozen lake. You don't have to take a suite in the five-star Palace, Kulm, or Carlton. You can stay in much more modestly priced three, and four star hotels. In fact, St Moritz is no more expensive than anywhere else in Switzerland - and is currently a lot cheaper than the big-name French resorts. What's even more surprising to the first timer here is the range and extent of the world class skiing. Fast groomed pistes with a minimum metre-base don't really come much better than this. "Did you ever race?" I asked Michelle from the Suvretta Ski School, after the first lightening descent.She nodded. "At what level?" "World Cup." "Downhill?" She nodded. Ok. Sometimes in life, it's better not to ask questions and just ski. St Moritz' classic clientele is slowly giving way to a much more sporty type of person. These days, fur coats are no longer de rigueur. You'll see far more technical ski pants and jackets, along with a few more eccentric outfits. Today we stumbled across an Italian snowboarder who looked like he was on the run from Alcatraz.
Also, if you work at it, you can find a pretty girl in traditional local costume to carry your skis for you if you happen to have found the right place to stay.
Chesetta is a sumptuous new chalet for up to 14 people in the quaint nearby village of Silvaplana. It comes complete with a cinema, sauna, steam room, gym, and glorious views of the village from a giant picture window in the sitting room...as well as outstanding cuisine. I guess this proves that while St Moritz may be looking to widen its appeal, the old values still hold good. Whether you choose to stay here or in the three-star Julier Palace, you'll have a great time. Just don't tell anyone else about the amazing skiing.
Click here for our St Moritz resort report. The other end of the Four Valleys - 25/2/2010 10:25by Peter Hardy Editor Peter Hardy reports on the resorts at the other end of the Four Valleys - February 25, 2010
"Typical Verbier-ite," said Jean-Pierre to my friend Melody Sky as we sat down to lunch in a mountain restaurant above Nendaz. "You've lived in Verbier for eight years, skied almost every day of each winter - and you've never been over here until today!" As tourist director for the 'other' major resort in the Four Valleys, Jean-Pierre is used to the oohs and aahs of delight of skiers who venture beyond Verbier's own ski area. Similarly, most skiers who base themselves on the far side of the 400km of piste, rarely bother to make the 45-minute journey across to Verbier. In staying here this week to discover the rest - actually most - of the Four Valleys, the first big surprise was the size of Nendaz.
When I first came here in the 1990s, Nendaz appeared to be little more than a lift station surrounded by sprinkling of ski shops and apartments. Now it has 4,000 chalets and is actually larger than Verbier. Surprisingly, you can count the number of British tour operators here on one hand, including Ted Bentley with its handful of comfortable chalets conveniently situated for the lifts. A modern gondola takes you up the mountain, but as you make your way across to Siviez and little Veysonnaz you have to cope with a lift system that is hopelessly inadequate for the volume of high season skiers. It's a long time since I queued for 10 minutes to get on a Poma. Indeed, T-bars and Pomas and the occasional chair-lift, provide the main means of uphill transport. But the terrain is beautifully varied, with some outstanding itinerary runs. Little Veysonnaz has a fast modern gondola out of the village - if you can call the small strip of pizzerias and shops a 'village'. We stayed here in the beautiful ski-in ski-out Hidden Dragon, a chalet built on feng shui principles with the best chalet spa (and adjoining yoga studio) we've ever seen, along with a real miniature cinema. If anything, the snow was slightly better at this end of the ski area - although it was pretty good everywhere - and during high season February it was also much less busy here. Our favourite run was the undulating yet steep Piste de l'Ours (World Cup Women's Downhill course), which was all but deserted.
Fluffy goodness and Jaegerbombs - 23/2/2010 17:20by Arabella Mileham Arabella Mileham, welove2ski's editorial assistant, reports on the snow conditions in Verbier - February 23, 2010 To my surprise, I had a fab day skiing over in Savoleyres today. It'd snowed overnight and was still pretty cloudy in resort. As the cloud was definitely thickest over the Medran, I headed out in the opposite direction, still half expecting another white-out. The snow conditions were lovely though - lots of fluffy goodness with some patches of powder here and there. Although still snowing half-heartedly, weak sunshine managed to get through and even when the snow became proper flurries in the afternoon, the visibility remained good. However it is beginning to feel like Spring - riding up the cranking chair-lift from Tzoumaz, you could hear birds singing away, although luckily the tell-tale Spring sound of running water hasn't quite started.
Most of the off-piste was already fairly tracked out, but there was still a little of the fresh stuff just off the shoulder of the Verbier-facing side of the mountain and a great little gully hidden between the main wide pistes to the other side, which was a lot of fun. I ended up skiing through the trees under the slow green two-man chair up from Tzoumaz. Unfortunately, when I got to the bottom of the valley, I found a steady trickle of people walking uphill towards me. Now, I don't mind hiking anywhere when there's the promise of a glorious powder field at the end of the hike, but I when you have to drag yourself up to a chair-lift because Televerbier can't get the Tzoumaz bubble going and don't bother warning you about it, it's a slightly different matter! It was rather a shame that there were no ice-hockey playing monks on the small rink below the bubble this week. Rather inexplicably, I saw them playing last week, long robes flying in the wind a bit like a tame Quidditch practice. Still no idea quite why they were there but it was an amusing sight!
I think I'd better remove my laptop to a safe distance - a party is just breaking out in staff accommodation, with Jaeger-bombs and champagne in the offing. Considering there aren't any glasses anywhere in the building - and even the jam jars have run out - it seems to be a case of swigging from the Jaeger bottle and then the can of red bull, followed by vigorous head-shaking to mix the two together... You can't say seassonaires aren't classy!! Click here for our Verbier resort report. Water-skiing through coffee icing - 23/2/2010 17:16by Arabella Mileham Arabella Mileham, welove2ski's editorial assistant, reports on the snow conditions in Verbier - February 22, 2010 Now that the English half-term is over, suddenly life is a lot more relaxed. The slopes are still busy but the queues are nothing like as bad. The temperature has been yo-yoing all week - one minute you're skiing through fresh snow, the next it's more like caster sugar and by the time you get to the bottom of the Medran, you're surfing through the top of a coffee cake.
The rise is temperature on Thursday last week meant that the slopes became pretty melty in places and as soon as the temp dropped again, froze to form hard-packed ice. There are also some patches of mud and even a few blades of grass poking through, especially on the final run home - the top of Carrefour is getting particularly carved away as everyone takes the same route home. However I bumped into Roddy, one of our Verbier snoggers, yesterday and he assured me that there is still powder down Vallon D'Arbi at the moment. How long it'll stay though is another matter! Despite all the meltiness, I still managed a great ski today with the gang. As everyone was a little hung-over, we took it fairly easily - Mont Gele was very tempting but I'm afraid we wussed out. Not quite sure how I ended up skiing switch most of the way down to Ruinette, but anyway! One piece of good news though - staff accommodation finally got a once over this morning. The person with the lowest tolerance to squalor (which wasn't me for a change!) finally snapped and after a whirlwind of chucking out dead cake and stale bread, retrieving mugs from underneath the sofa (how I wish I was kidding) and transferring the piles of manky crockery from the sink to the dishwasher, a semblance of civilisation has been restored. I give it until Wednesday before it needs doing again... Until then, I'm off to the Croc Bar now to chill with a mojito and some über-kitsch, smoky euro-lounge tunes... Click here for our Verbier resort report. Squalor and skiing - 16/2/2010 14:58by Arabella Mileham Arabella Mileham, welove2ski's editorial assistant, reports on the snow conditions and pending Mardi Gras celebrations in Verbier - February 16, 2010 Now that Valentine's day is over (and we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief that rigidly enforced romantic gestures are over for another year) the main question on everyone's lips in Verbier is what to wear for Mardi Gras. I feel a little sheepish for having completely forgotten to pack a half-decent fancy dress outfit with me as everyone always makes so much effort. I've now got about an hour to either cobble something together fashioned out of tinfoil and sticky-back plastic (actually, I don't think you can get the latter in resort) or be a party-pooper and make a stand for personal dignity. Hmmm, as I'm feeling totally uninspired at the moment and the only think I want to make is a chocolat chaud, it may end up being the latter. There are some aspects of seasonnaire life that I had conveniently forgotten in the years since I was last working out here - much as women reputedly forget the pain of labour shortly after giving birth. My hands are already as dry as a bone despite the wonders of Elizabeth Arden's 8 hours cream and I'm not sure if it's heartening or depressing to remember my way around the Coop with such unerring accuracy. However the weirdest thing is being back in staff accommodation. It's a return to eating bread and brownies during the daytime, the kettle fusing every time you want a cup of tea, and the usual seasonal deprivations of no mugs, milk, loo paper or light bulbs because no-one has remembered to bring any back... However, there is as much cake as you can eat and - if you can find an empty jam-jar to use as a glass - loads of wine. However, my housemates for the week are a great bunch and it's also lovely to catch up with people I was out here with several years ago, including our snogger, Oli from European Snowsport and the guys from Performance Verbier. As staff accommodation is clearly not the most propitious place to work in, I have found myself a great new 'office' to operate from. Le Rouge, a bar/restaurant at the end of the piste by Brunet bus stop, opened at the end of last season and does a fine line of relaxed chilling. With loads of sheepskin rugs and a good vibe, it's a really nice place to wind down in the evenings after work. Last night, I came with a few of the Armadillos and had a game of giant backgammon and a quiet pint, which made a change from the rigors of an evening in the Pub Mont Fort or après in the Farinet. However, having sat outside on the terrace for the best part of two hours, the DJ pumping behind me, my hands are too frozen to continue typing and I think my laptop battery is about to give up the ghost. I guess I had better start thinking about that costume again... Click here for our Verbier resort report. The Ghost of Chalet girls past... - 13/2/2010 14:55by Arabella Mileham Arabella Mileham, welove2ski's editorial assistant, dons her marigolds to revisit life as a seasonnaire and report on the snow conditions in Verbier - February 13, 2010 I've definitely just stepped back in time. Half-term week was looming fast when I answered a plea to come out to Verbier for a week to fill in for a chef who's had to return to the UK due to a family illness. It's that time of the season when chalet staff are generally in high demand due to half of them falling ill, falling over or generally just falling about. So this week I have found myself back in rubber gloves, oven-timer in one hand, laptop in the other and acting as a chef for 12 guests, while trying to snatch the odd hour or two to sub-edit the latest snogs, as well as checking out the conditions on the slopes. I seem to have just missed a fresh patch of powder that fell on the 4 vallées at the end of last week - Bruson in particular has been awesome (or so I'm told) and should be the best place to head to at the end of next week, when another dump is expected. However, it was lightly snowing when I first arrived (Thursday afternoon) and the temperatures have been around minus 10, so the conditions have remained pretty good, although increasingly tracked out and mogully in the afternoon. Friday was a bluebird day but bitterly cold and punctuated with a fair amount of glittery mist - it looks lovely but pretty much hits you in the face on chair-lifts, freezing your nose before heading towards your fingers and toes. Before I got just too damn chilly to continue skiing, I had a great couple of hours warming up. Starting over by Lac de Vaux, Atelas and Ruinettes, I skied all around La Chaux for a while, before heading up to the base of Mont Fort (though I decided to err on the cautious side so early on in the week and wussed out of the mogul field, inviting as it looked). The queues weren't too big, but next week will be mega-busy as the half-term hoards descend. Bearing that in mind, I skied over at Savoleyres on Saturday in an attempt to avoid the crowds. The slopes didn't seem too packed but there was the odd wait at the chair-lifts, which is quite unusual over there. I didn't manage to find any powder but kept to the pistes, which were pretty fast, with good snow but a few patches of ice in places. After playing on the south facing slopes, I blasting down to Tzoumaz and eventually skied back to Verbier via Carrefour as the valley was shrouded in mist. There are some views you just don't tire of... Click here for our Verbier resort report. Flaine celebrates its 42nd birthday - 25/1/2010 18:29by Peter Hardy Two Welove2ski editors are in Flaine this week for the British Schoolgirls Races and staying in convenient Residence Flaine Foret with Erna Low,
Flaine celebrates its 42nd birthday this year and is moving serenely into middle-age with a fresh confidence with new lifts and a new MGM apartment complex on the drawing board. Not that you can find much middle-aged around here this week - the resort is packed with teenage girls in figure-hugging catsuits all screaming undying support for each other.
Each January Flaine hosts the British Schoolgirl Races, an annual gathering of both novice and experienced racers from 47 schools that for three days transforms the resort into a kind of pony club meet on ice. Zealous parents and a smattering of teachers on freebies look on anxiously from the touchline as girls aged 11-17 throw themselves down the mountain through 30 gates with extraordinarily mixed results. Over two runs in today's giant slalom the last finisher was nearly three minutes behind the winner. There are tears and joy, but it's all good fun. Meanwhile, beyond the racing arena Flaine and rest of the Grand Massif is skiing near its January best with 270cm on the upper slopes and around 70cm at resort level. 
Canyons and huskies - 14/1/2010 17:52by Arabella Mileham Arabella Mileham, welove2ski's editorial assistant, reports on the snow conditions and the cross-country skiing in the Leutasch Valley - January 13, 2010 Oh, I can also definitely feel muscles that I was not aware of before today! Stupidly, I wasn't quick enough of the mark to book a massage last night, so a quick swim and a sauna had to suffice before dinner in Seefeld. The food at Krachelemoos was absolutely fantastic - I had a particularly mouthwatering shashlik of pork on creamed Savoy and Tirolean apfelstudel with a cinnamon and toffee ice-cream - and the now obligatory schnapps, of course.
After the strenuous activity of yesterday, today's plan of snow shoeing and dog-sledding with Tirol Alpin sounded a lot more chilled. However, I hadn't reckoned on being leashed round the waist to Maggie, the most inconsistent and noisy husky on the planet. She didn't get off to a brilliant start by lying down in the snow to have her tummy scratched and it soon became clear that she just wanted attention - running up the hill with me lumbering after in my unwieldy snow shoes only to stop dead and wait for me, just as the gradient increased. After the first hill, she was relegated to the sled and I was attached to a rather less high-maintenance dog to enjoy the walk through the walk. Tramping through the trees in the woods behind Kirchplatz was lovely. It's pretty rare to wander quietly through the trees just enjoying the scenery as I usually whiz past it on skis. However our destination was a gorge further up in the forest for a spot of canyoning.
Now, I have to admit that I'm a bit of a wuss when it comes to throwing myself off cliffs. I probably shouldn't be as I spend half of my childhood clambering over rocks, climbing trees and swinging across the garden on ropes, Tarzan-style - but I generally prefer to hold on wherever possible! The zip-wire across the gorge was great fun but I was distinctly less keen on the 40m abseil when we got to the other side. But a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do... so with jelly legs and a white face, I braved it for the descent. There was quite a large over-hang which I hadn't really expected so I ran out of cliff to walk down after 15m or so and it was with undignified relief that I reached terra firma, and was able to clip myself onto the ropes strung across the rocks.
As it was pretty nippy, we didn't explore the canyon for terribly long but after a little bit of clambering around the rocks, we made our way up through the snowy gorge to the spot where the dogs were tethered to find a Tirolean picnic waiting for us. After a couple of mugs of tea mit rum and a rather good schapps (it seems that anytime is schnapps time in Tirol!) we piled onto the dog sleds for the race home. Thundering through the Leutasch Valley was tremendous fun but there only was time for a quick coffee on arrving at the hotel before collecting our stuff for our final cross-country trail.
We'd already pumped Steve, the Headwater rep, for information about where to go, so armed with maps and cross-country skis and with the light slightly fading, we were dropped off at Moos for our 5km langlauf home. Our route took us along the floor of the valley with views over the Wetterstein to our left. After a great deal of faffing getting into our skis, we made quite good time and became so mesmerized concentrating on the tramlines in front of us that we only stopped for a quick hot chocolate when we were in sight of Kirchplatz - about 5 mins from home. Perhaps it wasn't such a good move as sitting down made my newly discovered muscles start to seize up a little and it was with great difficulty (and not a little swearing) that I clipped my skis back on for the final 200 yards towards home - and the bar!
I would definitely do cross-country again, but I think next time, I might spend a little bit longer preparing my legs in advance. The Vikings who allegedly invented this great sport were probably a little bit hardier than I am! For more information about the Olympiaregion Seefeld and Leutasch see www.seefeld.com or click here for our Cross-country skiing guides. Bambi takes to the slopes - 12/1/2010 20:58by Arabella Mileham Arabella Mileham, welove2ski's editorial assistant, reports on the snow conditions in Leutasch and Seefeld in Tirol and tries her hand (as well as her arms and legs) at a spot of cross-country skiing - January 12, 2010 Tucked in a corner of Olympiaregion Seefeld, 25km northwest of Innsbruck, the Leutasch valley and neighbouring Seefeld is a mecca for cross-country skiing. I headed out for a few days on a Headwater holiday, eschewing my normal downhill in favour of this ancient, Nordic sport.
Innsbruck was unusually snowy when we landed and the white stuff was still falling as we arrived at the Sporthotel Xander in Kirchplatz, after the shortest possible transfer - a smooth and painless 45 minutes after touching down. It had been very peculiar flying over a snowy Britain on an almost empty Easyjet flight, so this made it a hat-trick of staggering proportions.
Although we were primarily here for the cross-county, a visit to the Alps wouldn't be complete without a little downhill, so Tuesday morning saw us up, bright and early, making out way down the road to Rosshütte, to check out the slopes at Seefeld. After all the snow the night before, it was beautiful groomed corduroy all the way, with some great powder to the sides of the pistes. I probably should have put my nice, fat all-mountain Salomon Tornado Extremes through a darn sight more gruelling test than I did, but as the first run since April last year (not to mention testing the local schnapps the night before) I think I can be forgiven for restraint on the powder-front.
It was a pretty blinking cold -9 degrees up top but gloriously sunny. My teeth were definitely the coldest part of me because I was grinning so much to be back on the slopes. We worked our way around the slopes of Rosshütte with Markus (the head of the Tourist Office for the region, no less) as our knowledgeable and charming guide and ripped down virtually empty pistes towards queue-less chairs, only stopping for a brief and very welcome der Kakao mit ruhm at the Rosshütte restaurant. As well as the new café and terrace, the lifts have been upgraded over the last three years to speedy six-chairs, although the Seefeld Jochbahn is still a dinky, red phonebox style, 12-person gondola. Although it's a bit of a tight squeeze, it was worth it for the views over the spectacular Karwendel Nature Park to the northeast and Wetterstein mountains, not to mention the only black run of this small area.
Over the other side of the valley at Hamelekopf, we could see some interesting lines down a jaggedy couloir, but the off-piste can be unpredictable and it is not readily encouraged. However, the top of the route yielded some beautiful, ungroomed powder and we had a great run down to lunch at the Reitherjoch Alm. We rounded off a feast with a massive shared skillet of 'Kaiserschmarrn' - a whopping Tirolean caramelised, fluffy pancake, liberally soused with icing sugar and served with apple puree. A main course in its own right, it's utterly delicious but probably dangerous to the waistline - a few spoonfuls each were more than enough to send us pelting through the trees (to the alarm of the locals walking up) and the final downhill run towards town.
A quick scoot across town and a boot swap later, we were kitted out and ready for our first foray into langlaufing. There are two styles of cross-country, classic and skating, and we were going for the former, apparently the most efficient way to move across a flat area of snow - although maybe not the way I was doing it! The Cross Country Academy in Seefeld is situated by the picturesque Seekirchl right by the Olympic centre and one of the many cross country trails. It is run by former Olympic medallist, Martin Tauber and its team of yellow-clad tall, tanned langlauf instructors are easily spotted around the tracks. The upside of this is great tuition but the downside is that they make it looks so damn easy while you're slipping Bambi-like across the frozen plains.
Although the boots are a lot comfier than their Alpine counterparts, I felt horribly precarious perched on top of my ridiculously thin skis and it's hard not to revert to Alpine techniques, which frankly don't work here! Settling into tramlines cut in the snow of the trail made it a lot easier to keep boot, knee, and nose in line while perfecting the walking arabesques. By the time I'd worked up enough steam to light up Oxford Street though, I started to get into some sort of rhythm, swinging one arm forward, the opposite leg back and slightly bouncing on the middle of my ski to prevent myself slipping backwards. (they are softly rippled on the underside which is supposed to help) This was fine on level ground (after a fashion) but far less effective when faced with a slope. However, after an hour and 40 minutes we'd done a mind-boggling 7km around the circular course, stopping only to look at the Olympic ski jump and check out the new biathlon range. All in all, it was a huge fun, but I fear in will be agony tomorrow despite spending half an hour recovering in the steam room of the hotel!
Arabella travelled to Tirol in Austria with Headwater on the 'Cross Country Skiing in Leutasch and Seefeld' holiday. Prices of start at £1,009 per person for seven nights 4* accommodation at the Hotel Xander including breakfast and dinner, ski equipment hire (skis, boots and poles) and a guided ski programme with a Headwater resident representative. With flights and transfers, prices start from £1,187 per person Gatwick to Innsbruck with Thomson Airways, or can be arranged from most UK airports. For more information about the Olympiaregion Seefeld and Leutasch see www.seefeld.com. Click here for our Cross-country skiing guides. From the Dolomites to Watership Down Deux Mille - 8/1/2010 10:14by Peter Hardy There's 26cm of fresh powder and all runs are open - and that's just in Hampshire at Watership Down Deux Mille. Over here in San Cassiano in the Sudtirol we've picked up the same amount overnight and it's still snowing like billy-o.
It's off to work we go in San Cassiano today It's all a dramatic change from yesterday when I continued my gastro tour of Altia Badia. Nothing too strenuous, you understand. I paused for a light lunch of spaghetti with lobster at Club Moritzino and later an eight-course dinner from remarkable chef Norbert Niederkofler (pictured below) at the two-star Michelin St Hubertus in the Hotel Rosa Alpine in San Cassiano. The pigeon with tempura snails was a treat, I can tell you. Sadly, I should point out that I don't normally live like this. On the stroke of midnight the fairytale crashed. Now I'm back to spag bol and baked beans.
Chef Norbert Niederkofler at the St Hubertus How much of the Sella Ronda they manage to open today remains to be seen. But it's only of academic interest to me because I'm changing resorts. I'm leaving snowy San Cassiano for equally snowy Watership Down 2000...Gatwick and trains permitting.
Pictured above: tree-skiing at Watership Down 2000 Eating the South Tyrol - 6/1/2010 22:36by Peter Hardy One of our editors is eating his way around a corner of the Sudtirol. Here's his menu-of-the-day from San Cassiano.
It hasn't snowed here since New Year's day, although it might tonight - judging by the storm clouds brewing over the Brenner Pass and Austria this afternoon. But who cares? The pistes are perfeto and the panorama of the Dolomites remains as gloriously majestic as ever. Skiing down Forcelles today and looking up at those cathedral-like crags that would have glowed pink in the sunset had there been a visible one, I can't help but think of Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger. They said it was in Wyoming. No it wasn't, it was here. It's pretty comforting to know that Rambo in reality doesn't like heights. When he was on the rock-face they had to build wooden screens to filter out his vertigo.
The notorious Val Mesdi Across the valley the Val Mesdi, that cleft in the Sella Ronda that runs from Passo Pordoi to Colfosco, looked just about skiable, but uninviting. Anyway my heart - or rather my stomach - was largely (and that's the operative word today) indoors rather than out. I'm eating my way around Alta Badia. You can, I am assured, ski the Sella Ronda in under three hours if you don't stop and there aren't any queues. Doing it my way will take you at least a week. The chefs of a dozen Michelin-starred restaurants in this delightful part of the Sudtirol have each created a different dish for a similar number of mountain restaurants. I thought it would be fun - and someone employed me to - go around and see what they all taste like. My Altia Badia instructor friend Gunther agreed to act as guide. He just had no idea what he was in for: grappa marinated trout at 10.30am doesn't feature in the ski school manual.
By midday and a bit of octopus carpaccio we'd speeded up - largely thanks to the different grappa we'd had to consume along the way. I mean when the chef's offering, it would be churlish to refuse, wouldn't it? The only way to cope was to give the region a proper work out with some fast GS turns on the mainly blue and red runs. San Cassiano - La Villa - Corvara - Colfosco - Selva Gardena...I'd forgotten quite what a stupendous area this is. The runs are mainly intermediate, best suited to families and fast cruisers. The cucina is expert.
Plenty of fresh powder in La Plagne - 5/1/2010 10:40by Kat Boland Our new snogger, Kat Boland, has sent us her first blog on the snow conditions in La Plagne - January 5, 2010. While we wait for her snogspot to go live, we've incorporated it into our Editors' blog. Today the sun is shining in La Plagne and with plenty of fresh powder yesterday and last night, conditions are great. Hopefully the weather will settle down from now on as over the past couple of weeks temperatures have ranged from +4 to -20 at 1800 meters. Things are definitely in full swing in La Plagne now. I enjoyed an excellent New Year's bash with my mates at Bellcote last week and all the bars seem to be packed every night now, which is great after a very quite start to the season. Wifi issues at my chalet have meant this is my first snog but it'll be the first of many! That's all for now. Bon ski! Click on the link for our La Plagne resort report The long drive home - 28/12/2009 23:05by Peter Hardy
Izzi Hardy on her last day in Val Welove2ski editor heads for home at the end of his car journey to the snow. Time for the long drive home. All good things come to an end - but Christmas week in Val d'Isère seemed to drain away even quicker than usual in a riot of outstanding snow, food, and drink. Sunday morning found me heading down the hill in the Skoda, with a family cargo of luggage, skis, boots, Christmas presents and one passenger. While the other three flew quickly home on a VIP/Snowline charter flight from Geneva, I headed for Chamonix with my ski racing son. Max is spending a few months washing dishes and working as a teaching assistant at the British Ski Academy in Les Houches. In return he gets technique training from Malcolm Erskine and his coaches. This should sharpen up his performance when he returns to the skicross race circuit later in the season. Lying awake on my last night in Val I'm thinking: "Will I have to put on chains to get out of town?" I'd sell my own grandmother - if I had one - to avoid putting on chains. In the event, 4x4 on summer tyres were enough to get me up the slope from garage to chalet. Despite all the new snow, the road to the valley had been snowploughed clean. We cut on the back road from Albertville through the Val d'Arly on a beautiful sunny Sunday morning past Flumet, Praz-sur-Arly, and Megève, and around St Gervais to join the Autoroute Blanche for the last few kilometres to Les Houches.
Max and the Skoda Goodbye to Max, his five pairs of skis, two pairs of boots, waxing table, work box, oversized suitcase, two backpacks and the biggest ski bag you've ever seen. I swear the Skoda breathed a sigh of relief as I set the satnav for Tunel sous La Manche. I've done the drive-in-one more times than I care to remember - and after each I say 'never again'. But this time, to my astonishment, I almost enjoyed it. In all, including the leisurely meander to Les Houches with a supermarket stop along the way, it took just 14 hours to cover the 780 miles. Did I exceed the 130kph speed limit? Maybe occasionally, but not by much. The cops were out in force on motorways that - apart from the usual short stretch around Dijon - were almost traffic free.
On the road The Tunnel was a contrastingly different experience to the Eurostuck chaos on the outward journey. With a Flexi ticket, I'd have been on the train within three minutes of arrival at the near deserted terminal - were it not for Amsterdam-Detroit bomber. Security was at its highest at both the French and English customs posts. Well, not actually at the French - they'd turned out the lights and gone home when I arrived at 9.30pm. "What's that you've got in the box?" asked the English customs guy, pointing at my ski box. "Skis," I said. He nodded. I expect he sees a lot of those. The real joy of the Skoda is the comfortable, stable ride with 3.6 litres of V6 engine under the bonnet. My only dislike remains its unquenchable thirst. I started with the 60 litre tanks three-quarters full (on the way out I topped up south of Chambery). I had to buy 67 euros of petrol at Bourg-en-Bresse, the same again south of Rheims, and - in order to get home to Hampshire - a final £55 worth at Maidstone. But overall it's a great ride. I particularly like the artful bonnet catch. Click it one way and it opens just that: a saloon car bonnet. Double click and you suddenly find yourself the owner of spacious hatchback with tons of room for skis and all the other essential winter clobber. I'd buy one, if someone else bought the petrol. I dropped off the Klack and Go snowchains and snowSocks at Snowchains.co.uk which, apart from being a website, is also a warehouse in Borough Green near Sevenoaks, and was home and in bed by midnight. "What kept you?" said my wife Felice. A hot date with a very fast car. For more on driving see our Driving to the Alps feature. Christmas Day blog - 25/12/2009 15:20by Peter Hardy
Peter Hardy on piste this morning Father Christmas needed sleigh chains to get into and out of Val d'Isere today as winter arrived with a vengeance. Stocking presents were quickly cast aside in favour of catching the first lift, as as pisteurs did a good job of progressively opening pistes in the teeth of the blizzard. Val was already skiing at its Christmas best. And the best just got better.
However the new snow came with a fresh danger warning: "Cough," said off-piste guru Henry Schniewind , "that's all you've got to do to trigger an avalanche right now." At the time we were safely ensconced in a bar, so I guess he meant outside. "The snowpack is very unstable with lots of slabs. With a local warning of 4/5 You need to be very careful indeed.". In Tignes a girl in the ski patrol was badly injured by a slab that crushed her against a piste machine and in Chamonix a snowboarder was killed in a slide on the Tete de Balme. Resorts across France and Switzerland urged skiers and snowboarders not to stray from the piste until the pack has stabilised.
Max Hardy sorting out his sister's goggles. Photo: Barney Hardy. Up on the mountain visibility was strictly limited and high winds meant that lifts were prone to sudden closure. This afternoon skiers were trapped for an hour in the Aeroski gondola coming back up from Tignes Le Lac. This caused considerable discomfort for at least one unlucky skier. Still, he did have a water bottle, and as as the picture below shows, not all precipitation fell as snow.
Caught short in the Aeroski goldola. See our Val d'Isère resort report here Christmas by car - 21/12/2009 21:08by Peter Hardy Welove2ski editor Peter Hardy and ski racer son Max continue their Christmas journey to Val d'Isère by car across snowbound Europe to the Alps.
It's 8.30pm in a freezing cold service station somewhere in Champagne. It's over 14 hours since we left home and we've come relatively nowhere. By now - without Eurostuck and still falling snow - I'd planned to be tucking into dinner somewhere near Lyon 300 miles further south. But we're tired. It's been a long day. To find a hotel I should, of course, have started looking at least two hours ago. But it's never like that, is it? In summer they're all booked up. In winter, they don't really care if you stay or not. Rural France hibernates. In small towns across the country they've normally drunk their cocoa, donned their Wincyettes and turned out the lights by 9pm. But, thanks to the red Michelin Guide we strike exceptionally lucky. Vitry Le Francois, a historic old staging post before they built the motorway, is just 20km away. "Oui," says Madame at the Restaurant de la Cloche: "if you can get here by 9pm we will give you dinner, but not a moment later." And yes, they have rooms. The Skoda Superb senses a warm garage billet out of the falling snow and we look forward to a succulent coq au vin and a bottle of the local finest. Wonderfully, that's what happens. Sometimes, not always when touring across Europe, you hit the jackpot. Meanwhile Marco, my Dutch friend, who is on the way from Amsterdam with his family to house-sit for us in Hampshire is still, after 12 hours, stuck in Calais awaiting a ferry. Yes, the kids are tired and hungry. He doesn't seem to want to hear about our dinner and the wine. The next morning we push on southwards in deteriorating weather conditions. Just getting back to the autoroute through drifting snow is an ordeal that takes all my concentration. But the four-wheel drive Skoda rises Superbly to the challenge. It has only two apparent faults. The first is its thirst - the 3.5 litre engine drinks petrol at roughly the same rate as your average busload of Germans downs litres of beer at the Munich Oktoberfest. We filled up in Kent, we filled up in Champagne, we filled up in Burgundy, we filled up Savoie - and each tank holds 60 litres! Has this car got diabetes? 20-24 MPG is not the kind of consumption figure you wanted to boast about in Copenhagen last week. Th second fault is slightly more unexpected. Despite adding an Arctic concentration of anti-freeze to the screenwasher reservoir we freeze at -3C and the temperature is -9C. The amount of salt on the road obscures vision within minutes of each stop. But while less robust cars sliver along in the slow lane we power on towards Val d'Isere at maximum speed. The worry, with this much snow in central France, is how we are going to get up the hill in the dark when we finally arrive. Yes, we've got our special 9mm low profile Klack and Go snowchains provided by Snowchains.co.uk which are the only ones that the Superb will take. But I've been there before. With an unfamiliar car and unfamiliar chains I know it's going to be a long and bitterly cold Klack before we Go. We've been in heavy snow for 600 miles from Hampshire to Lyons...but then it disappears. Typical really, when you're going on a ski holiday. We should have stayed at home and given the Salomons a go on Watership Down. But by Bourg-St-Maurice dry snow is falling again. Despite summer tyres, the final climb up to Val proves to be a doddle and we finally arrive in a resort that is covered - deliciously - in fresh snow. We even make it uphill on packed road to our chalet with not so much as a whisper of a slither. Driving? Well done, Skoda. Worth it, really. We've got all the presents and the skis out here with no weight restrictions...Oh and my friend Nick Morgan from Le Ski is still sitting in a snowbound Manchester Airport. Happy Christmas.
View from Snowline's Chalet Santons Solaise window. For more on driving see our Driving to the Alps feature. Eurostuck - 21/12/2009 08:18by Peter Hardy On Saturday one of Welove2ski's editors, Peter Hardy, set off to drive to Val d'Isère for Christmas, choosing one of the worst days in the history of Eurotunnel to make his journey. Here's his story. Leaves on line....wrong type of snow....and now wrong type of air! Britain on the rails? You couldn't make it up. The first reports were coming in long before dawn as my ski racing son Max and I left Hampshire with eight pairs of skis and Christmas presents in our laden Skoda Superb. 2000 Eurostar passengers on five trains had been trapped overnight inside the tunnel. All because the locos couldn't take the transition from the extreme cold air of northern France to the humid atmosphere underground. Condensation fried the electronics. "Six hours," said Eurostar, when the BBC finally forced a reluctant comment from them. "14 hours on the train from Disneyland Paris," said one 'survivor'. "They turned off the power and told us not to breathe too deeply to conserve oxygen. It was very frightening." As a disaster-management and public-relations exercise by the train company it was a failure of epic proportions. "Poor train passengers", we thought, as we drove across snowy Kent. But what about Eurotunnel and us drivers? We learned that a 32-mile traffic jam had developed on the M20 but there was no news as to whether or not we should continue. If the BBC knew that cars could use the tunnel they failed to mention it at all.
Eurotunnel applied itself with equal vigour to the task of reducing road problems by supplying urgently-needed information to would-be travellers. Their website gave no news at all beyond 'delays'. However, it offered a passenger information line. We rang, and amazingly got through. "If you want information," said the recorded voice, "ring this number..." It was the same number that I had just rung. We decided to divert for breakfast with my daughter in snowbound Tunbridge Wells - and promptly, with deep embarrassment, got stuck. She lives up a steep drive, but surely the 4x4 Skoda with its enormously powerful 3.5 litre engine would power up it? No it wouldn't. We slithered sideways into the hedge. I'd borrowed snowchains from Kent-based Snowchains.co.uk. When they'd arrived at my home by courier the previous day, I'd hardly expected to carry them back to Kent and then be forced to fit them within 10 miles of the company's warehouse at Borough Green. But then this was clearly not proving to be a normal journey to the Alps. However, there was another solution. Time to test the Weissenfels WeissSock. It's "the smoothest ride ever on snow-covered roads" says the advert. This is a fabric sock that slips over the car wheel and will, I'm assured, get you out of trouble - although it's no substitute for chains. Wrong. I'm sure it works beautifully on the flat. But you have to be on the flat in order to fit it. "How are you going to get out to Val if you can't even get out of Tunbridge Wells?" asked my daughter's boyfriend. Shut up and go and cook breakfast. Finally with the aid of a bit of body power, the car was restored unharmed to the main road. According to the radio, the jam on the M20 goes all the way back from the coast to Maidstone. This was when the brain kicked in. What if we were to head down to Romney Marsh, wind our way on A and B roads to Folkestone - and then approach the Tunnel in the opposite direction to the traffic? It just might work. And it did. The rush in missing 31.5 miles of gridlock and joining the traffic just 600m before the Tunnel must be about the same as completing the Hahnenkamm course in Kitzbuhel and finding you're still on two skis and not in hospital. We inch towards check in, but our troubles aren't yet over. "Owing to severe weather conditions on the other side, the French are restricting the number of cars they will allow on the roads," says the lady at the kiosk. We've heard it all now. And we don't believe a word of it. Sure, it's snowy on the other side, but once we hit the A26 and point the Skoda towards Rheims and Lyon the road is clear. it's still bitterly cold; -9c on the car's exterior thermometer. But, finally, we're properly on our way to the Alps. What a day. Huez the snow? It's here! - 17/12/2009 20:10by Roger Bray Our News Editor Roger Bray reports on the snow conditions in Alpe d'Huez - December 17, 2009 It has hardly been a vintage start to the season in Alpe d'Huez but low temperatures ensured some excellent skiing on a limited number of pistes this week - and even sustained an adventure or two off them.
A metre plus of natural snow, immaculately prepared, made for pleasant, long runs between Pic Blanc at 3300m and the Plan des Marmottes, 1000m lower. Below that, where the resort's beginner and intermediate runs fan out, there was 30-40cm at best. But snow canon, which cover roughly 25% of its 240km of pistes, worked furiously at night. As a result, though there were some hard packed stretches, there were remarkably few stones or bare patches. Off piste conditions varied wildly. Even between its lower pistes, boot clip deep, unresisting snow lingered between lower pistes. Watch out though if forecasts of a few extra centimetres this weekend and more from Tuesday on prove accurate. There might just be enough to hide barely concealed rocks whose tell tale molehill shapes allowed me to steer a safe path.
Further up the hill you didn't know what to expect. With an instructor, Christophe, I side slipped between tight rocks below the Mine de l'Herpie to emerge into short but exquisite little couloir full of near perfect powder. Shangri-la. But later, after a long traverse to the Couloir Falken, we progressed on juddering edges from frozen ruts and lumps to wind pack which even threw my nimble guide off balance. 'You encountered all snow conditions in one run there', he observed afterwards, as I shook snow out of my pockets.
The resort comes in for some flak for vulnerability of its main, south facing bowl to sudden spells of warm weather but that's less of a problem in deep mid-winter and this week with sunshine and freezing temperatures (it's hovered around -8 degrees during the day) it has been a positive advantage. Views from the Pic Blanc observation platform were stunning, with Mont Blanc visible in the far distance and Mont Ventoux, like Alpe d'Huez itself, the climax of frequently used and notoriously arduous stages of the Tour de France, floating in a sea of cloud. According to Christophe you can see 20% of the surface area of France from here - though you might take that with a pinch of salt.
You can also swallow less than perfect conditions more readily when prices are not as outrageous as in some other resorts we could name. An omelette aux fines herbes for 10.80 euros or a half litre of beer for 3.50 euros seemed relatively reasonable. Many runs remained closed. It was not possible to ski to Vaujany or take the Sarenne tunnel route - claimed to be the longest black run in the Alps - though there was talk that the latter might open this weekend. I did make it down to Villard Reculas, at a mere 1480m, without feeling any scraping of skis though low cloud in the valley and a pre-Christmas absence of other skiers made it an eerie experience.
Visibility was so good I skied until almost 5pm, finishing with a flat run out past the stables where horses used to tow skiers in the resort's latest après-ski activity - ski joring - are kept. And there was enough snow to ski right to the door of tour operator Snowline's impressive new complex of five chalets. Built at the top of the resort area at about 1870m there are a couple of fast turns from the lifts, are full of the scent of fresh timber and are already booked solid for Christmas. But more of them elsehwere on the site, shortly. Click here for our Alpe d'Huez resort report. Winter is here with a vengeance! - 30/11/2009 21:03by Peter Hardy ...in Val d'Isère and Courchevel - November 30 2009
Val d'Isère followed its gloriously sunny opening day at the weekend with 25cm of fresh snow at village level - and more on the way. I spent Monday cruising the pistes on the Bellevarde side of the resort in the powder with Welove2ski Snogger, Paddy O'Powder who joined me from his native Courmayeur for some truly tremendous skiing. The only problem was the visibility, which was about as limited as it gets. Not that this worried Paddy, who floated along on his Scott Missions as if it was a blue sky day. The good news is that the heavy snowfall is not confined to Val and neighbouring Tignes. Driving down from the resort this evening, snow turned briefly to sleet at Aime and then quickly returned to snow again at Moutiers. On Friday Courchevel 1650 didn't have a flake but this evening you needed chains or snow tyres with four-wheel drive to tackle the approach road. It was littered with abandoned cars belonging to drivers caught unprepared by the severity of the storm. The resort itself is half-buried under a fresh 20cm -and it's still snowing! Click here for our Courchevel resort report. We're back in business - 24/11/2009 18:19by Peter Hardy Welove2ski editor Peter Hardy is in Val d'Isère and Tignes for the second day this week.
Whoopeeeee! We're back in business. Val d'Isère is opening on schedule on Saturday - although the link to Tignes may take another couple of days - and if I can find my favourite Dynastar powder skis, which seem to have mysteriously disappeared during the summer, I'll be on that first lift. What a difference a day makes! Just 24 hours ago postponement seemed inevitable. But exactly as predicted on our Weather pages, rain at dusk turned to snow by dinner time and I awoke this morning to 15cm of fresh powder on roads and roofs. Winter's back with a vengeance. This morning we had to dig the cars out and the road up to Tignes was littered with cars being fitted with chains. High winds kept the funicular from running for 90 minutes, but the Tissot chair is up and running two weeks ahead of schedule this year and provided a useful warm-up. Up on the glacier conditions were ....er...challenging with a 50km blizzard blowing and visibility close to zero. It was hard to tell which way was up and which way was down. Our weather maps optimistically predicted a window of sunshine at midday. Just for 60 anxious minutes the Welove2ski forecast came under heavy fire from the 50 skiers taking part in the first of our November Ski Clinics. Oh ye of little faith! Some 54 minutes behind schedule the clouds clear to reveal the perfect winter panorama. I skied 1500m vertical without stopping all the way down to funicular station at Val Claret. November in the Alps never ceases to surprise - and the dying days of the month are full of promise with the prospect of a serious storm hitting the region on Sunday and Monday. Click here for our Val d'Isère resort report. In the beginning...Val d'Isère and Tignes - 23/11/2009 17:57by Peter Hardy Welove2ski editor Peter Hardy is in Val d'Isère and Tignes this week. Here's his first daily report.
Pat Zimmer of Top Ski teaching a class in Val today Snow in Whistler may be wonderful, but large chunks of Europe are struggling to catch up. Here in Val d'Isère the locals are looking skywards and praying that a last-minute dump will prevent the postponement of Saturday's opening of the resort - and the power of collective prayer may just pull it off. If you'd asked me this morning I'd have that said there wasn't a chance. But outside my window this evening it's raining and the temperature is dropping rapidly. I'm hoping to open my curtains to an all-white panorama tomorrow. Our Weather Maps suggest some substantial new snow tonight and tomorrow, but whether it will amount to enough for Val to fire up its the lift system and open the link to Tignes at the weekend is in the lap of the gods. The resort is expected to make a decision by Wednesday morning at the latest. Two weeks ago it all looked so promising and racers on the Grande Motte glacier over in Tignes were training in winter conditions, but a spell of extremely mild weather brought rain last week below 2200m. That said, I've spent seven hours on the glacier today and you can ski all the way down to the funicular station at Val Claret with not a rock or even a pebble in sight. The bottom half is hard and icy in places, but the top is in good shape. I've skied here on the same week for the past 13 years and I'd rank the current November conditions a 7/10. I started the day with 50 turns in soft fresh powder from the top of the cable-car. This seemed not a bad way at all to kick off my season. The 50 skiers who joined me on the first of our November Ski Clinics felt much the same - plenty to smile about despite a cold wind that made a mockery of the -5C temperature. The only problem was the close cloud cover which prevented me - perhaps luckily - from examining my tracks. By the time we hit the bottom at nearly 4pm it was snowing heavily, so tomorrow looks extremely promising. It's not Whistler, but I could find myself in 30cm of new overnight powder. I suppose a couple of hours of sunshine is just too much to ask for? Probably. Click here for our Val d'Isère resort report. Holy Cow! - 15/10/2009 09:47by Peter Hardy Where have all the flowers gone? They're buried beneath a layer of snow in Klosters.
Holy cow! Alpine farmers don't normally panic. Life is measured by the passing seasons and taken at a steady pace. But let's just say that there's been a bit of bovver here in Klosters this week. A dusting of snow at the weekend sent them up scurrying up into the high pastures to bring down the last of the cows. By Monday morning they were struggling through 30cm of fresh snow, bells a-clanking. Winter is here. Flowers are still blooming in chalet window boxes, but yesterday to reach the Alpenrösli mountain restaurant for lunch up an already covered summer road we needed 4x4 and chains - and, pinch yourself, it's mid-October.
This morning it's bitterly cold, mountain and village are white. Kids are building snowmen and sledging. Last night over dinner in there was brave talks of skinning up the Parsenn. The redoubtable Ruth Guler who runs the Hotel Wynegg and, in effect, the whole resort for the past half century, said: "you're crazy. There's no base yet. You'll break a leg. Let it settle." She's right, of course. Autumn weather is notoriously fickle and it could all go away. But this morning I get the distinct impression that that is not going to happen even in the village, let alone on the mountain. Spencer has lost £2million, Andrew has lost two holidays, but some ex-Descent guests will still be going skiing - 21/8/2009 18:33by Peter Hardy Tory Party Treasurer Michael Spencer has lost £2 million in the collapse of Descent and the poor old Duke of York has lost two hols all in 24hrs. It's Black Friday for him. Peter Hardy reflects on the fall of Descent. If you're City tycoon Michael Spencer, losing £2 million probably has the same the emotional and financial impact as if you or I were paying a parking fine. That, by the way, is the figure given by his investment company IPGL for its loss in the collapse of luxury chalet operator Descent (IPGL was its third largest shareholder). Doubtless, he's pissed off at the loss. But it's not exactly going to stop him from going on holiday. The same cannot be said for Prince Andrew. He's lost his £30,000 deposit on Chalet Eugenia and currently has nowhere to stay for his ski trip - sorry, business trip - to the World Economic Forum in January in Davos. Reeling from the impact of this devastating news - which means losing out on one of the great cellars in the Alps - the poor old Prince has had more bad news from Gordon Brown. Because of the furore over the freeing of the Lockerbie bomber, he's been told to skip his forthcoming British trade mission trip to Libya and miss out on a bit of late summer sun. You can't help but feel sorry for both York, Spencer and the Descent CEO, Kit Harrison. Harrison seems to have been left standing alone in the glare of the floodlights to take the rap while the klaxons sound and all other management escapees seem to have headed for the wire. Harrison has done his best to help those guests who have already booked and the first positive fall-out came this afternoon within 24 hours of the crash.
While rival companies fought over the bones, one of the 19 chalet owners told me that not only would he and his wife be going it alone this winter. Not only would they continuing to offer a sumptuous Descent-style service, but they'd also be honouring existing bookings. Clients at the sumptuous Ferme de Moudon in Les Gets who have already paid and lost deposits of £20,000 to £30,000 with Descent will not have to pay twice and will still get their holidays this winter. Owner James Dobree said: "We have now employed the same former Descent staff as last year so, as far as the guests are concerned, nothing much will have changed. The standard of cuisine and service will be as high as ever. "Many of our guests return year after year and it is only right that we should honour the bookings of those who have already paid and lost their deposits." The Ferme de Moudon is the last word in alpine barn conversions. Muck out a magnificent 17th-century cow byre, mix in a few tons of euros, and transform it with flair and care - and you've got arguably the finest winter home in the entire French Alps.
James' wife Nicky Dobree has painstakingly avoided rustic Heidi kitsch - no heart-shaped fretwork or checked gingham curtains here. Instead she has taken the best original features of the old farm building and fused them with a cool 21st-century look to create a happy marriage of manure and minimalism. The chalet was featured on the TV programme, Grand Designs Abroad, and if you're interested, Dobree tells me there are several more weeks available for rent.
Adding the X-Factor - 12/7/2009 18:55by Peter Hardy
Photo: Future Forecast Peter Hardy takes a look into his crystal ball to find out which travel company is trying hardest to get us to the slopes this winter. VAT is the keyword of the moment. This is not the HMCE's miserable 15% tax, but Value Added Turns (or Ten-eighties, depending on whether you prefer piste to park). Basically, they're offering price-enhanced packages that take some of the sting out of the pound-euro exchange rate as well as convincing us that we can, despite it all, afford to ski this season. Mathew Prior of Crystal Ski was the first to set the bonus ball rolling a couple of weeks ago with the introduction of Crystal Ski Plus - 'No Hassle, no Hussle, Just Ski' says the strapline. The name of the new product is not going to win any prizes for originality - I guess we can blame Google Adwords for the absence of an iota of creativity here - but the price is right. £479 in Paradiski (La Plagne/Les Arcs) includes regional departures and slopeside accommodation, but much more importantly it also includes a lift pass as well as ski hire or carriage. How many of these holidays are actually available sounds far from Crystal clear, but Mathew promises there will be plenty of them and they will be extended beyond Aime and Bourg-St-Maurice as demand dictates.
Paradiski. Photo: Skishoot To counter the canvas of gloom and doom we need more positive offers such as these, where you can pay for as much as possible in pounds before you leave home. Crystal confirms that there will be far fewer holidays on offer this season and that anyone who thinks that they can wait for last-minute half-price deals like last year's is living in the past. Sure, they'll be limited deals of a kind, but no surviving tour operator is going to take that kind of a wholesale financial hammering two winters in a row. Yes, they've dropped their number of catered chalet beds by 40%, although they are quick to point out that chalets make up only 15% of their winter business. Overall the number of British skiers, according to Crystal, was down by over 13% last season on the previous one, after seven years of fairly consistent growth. But we still have rather more than a million regular skiers and snowboarders out there. Some 23.6% of these go to Austria - an increase of nearly two per cent of market share. Sensible prices here are cutting into France's 37%. Well done, Austria, we say. "Good, but we've got a long way to go," says Austria Tourist Director Oskar Hinteregger: "people forget that we were once the primary market for British skiers. I hope we will be again one day." Certainly if the main French resorts continue to overprice every commodity from cocktails to clothing as they do, it's only a question of time. Other slices of the ski market cake hold few surprises. Andorra is down from 7% to 5%. Italy's up a bit and North America is down a bit. All in all, said Mathew, we are in for a pretty tricky winter. I couldn't agree more, so keep those all-inclusive offers coming. Second barrel in the VAT campaign came from Inghams, second player in the mass market. Surprise, surprise, they are offering similar enhanced deals: packages to Slovakia, Andorra, and Romania with equipment rental, lift pass, and even tuition all included.
Romanian bear BBQ. Photo: Skishoot The lead-in price of £599 focuses on Poiana Brasov and, as they point out, it includes complimentary drinks. Actually, if you're beyond beginner level and have ever skied in Romania, you'll understand why lots of drinks - complimentary or otherwise - are absolutely essential to keep your mind off the banality of the pistes. Inghams would have done far better to find value-enhanced ways of getting us to mainstream Alpine ski areas rather than fiddling around on the periphery. Esprit Ski has come up with Crunch Busters. MD Andy Perrin, who helped found Crystal before taking over the family specialist operation, is a man for whom hyperbole is an entirely alien concept. "The ski market has never seen anything like this before," he says. Over 20 offers include free holidays for children and free equipment hire for them, up to £75 off holidays for adults, and free Monday 'kick-start' lessons for parents. Esprit says the offers combine to create savings of up to £1,500 for a family of four compared to the same holiday last season. The carrot for booking a holiday this season is undoubtedly price. Check out our Deals page for the pick of the packages. There are some amazing offers around - particularly for North America. Snowballs - 13/6/2009 17:01by Peter Hardy
This week Peter Hardy swaps his camel for his high horse and jousts in favour of our kids against Schools Secretary Ed Balls. If you don't know the date of your child's half-term holiday next February, just pick a ski travel brochure - any brochure will do - and find the most expensive holiday. It happens to be Thomson Ski & Snowboarding Preview that my hand lands upon. I open at random page 97, La Thuile in Italy. Let's see now...the Planibel Hotel half-board from Gatwick on January 31: £745, February 7: £809, February 14: £1,235, February 21: £745. No prizes, then. Oops! I've got it wrong - the price, not the date. On the Thomson website it's shot up now to £1,335. Terrible, this financial situation, isn't it? Of course, it's quite understandable to stick on another 100 quid - a total of £400 on the cost of the holiday. We'll just forget lunch on the mountain and the kids' jackets with have to last another year. Those of us who have school age children are resigned to being held to ransom every February, but don't blame Thomson or any other of our 150 ski tour operators. They've got to make a living. If demand is overwhelming for that one week, you really can't blame them for capitalising on it. After all, if last year is anything to go by, they'll be lucky to be half full for the other February weeks. As for low season January...let's pray for another bumper snow winter- but what if it's not? No, don't shoot the tour operator, don't even shoot Johnny Foreigner who owns your hotel or apartment, because he's also trying to make a euro or two when he can. Instead, aim your gun at the Government and the man responsible is Children's Secretary, Ed Balls.
Photo: Skishoot Half-term school holidays in England and Wales are traditionally spread across the two mid-February weeks. Until recently, local education authorities in the public sector and head teachers in the private have been able to plump for one or the other. The Scots, sensibly have their own holiday agenda, along with a superior education system. The English winter break wasn't such a shambles 40 or even 30 years ago when relatively few families travelled abroad in search of snow, sun, or both. But these days, February half-term has descended into hopeless holiday chaos. Leaving aside sea-and-sun seekers, half a million skiers besiege airports over the starting weekend. Most go to France where they mingle with one-third of French families who are also on holiday. Now the French don't always get it right. As the Queen, who had hoped for a flying visit to Normandy this summer, can testify. But for the past three decades they have sensibly staggered their school holidays by three geographical zones - Paris one week, Lyon the next, and so on. So why can't we do the same? Has anyone even asked? This produces a rye laugh from Andy Perrin, former Crystal boss and now MD of Esprit Ski and Total Ski: "Don't think we haven't tried," he says, "but over the years we've had no joy at all." But last year, the situation got much worse. Instead of the English and Welsh break being spread across two weeks, it was reduced to ONE, and in February 2010, it's ONE week again.. The effects of this on skiers and the ski industry are manifold: travel firms that are struggling to survive against the twin backdrops of the poverty-stricken pound and the eco-downturn, lose a vital high season week. The public suffers from the consequently inflated prices. Overcrowded airports and airways make travel a misery. But the much, much more important: this bumbling bureaucratic bottleneck is putting our children in serious danger. Modern high-speed lift systems dramatically reduce queues. French ski areas such as Espace Killy, Paradiski, and the Trois Vallées pride themselves on the fact that even at the busiest times queues now last no longer than a few minutes. But the queues disappear because the volume of skiers is simply being transferred to the slopes.
Photo: Skishoot As anyone who has skied down a blue motorway in a major French resort during half-term week will testify - you take your life in your hands. With so many skiers and snowboarders - and often inept ones at that - trying to turn in such a confined space, the risk of collision has become unacceptable. In resorts such as Méribel and Val d'Isère, where British skiers account for more than 30 per cent of the people on the mountain at any one time, serious injury - or worse - is an accident waiting to happen during half-term week. And it's all because the Government won't address the problem. So come on Ed Balls. You may not have got the reshuffle job that you wanted and therefore can do nothing to help with the currency situation, but you've still got a job (which is more than a lot of people have got). Your full title is Secretary of State for Children, Schools, and Families, which nicely covers every aspect of what we are talking about here. Don't dither. Just do it, before tragedy strikes. Stagger the February half-term across three weeks instead of one, and zone it, French-style across the country. Humping skis - 5/6/2009 12:14by Peter Hardy
Photo: Skishoot Welove2ski editor Peter Hardy gets the hump about ski carriage and security. Travelling around the world with ski equipment is becoming increasingly fraught, with airlines and even camels conspiring to make it an unpleasant and (in the case of camels and non-reclining Row 33D by the loo) a smelly experience. At Easter, the Flybe check-in girl at Southampton paled visibly at the sight of the helmet attached to my hand-luggage rucksack. Well, you would, wouldn't you? After a huddled conference with a colleague, she informed me that there could be a problem at the security desk, but it 'might be alright'. And so it was. But a week later when I arrived, suntanned and relaxed, at Grenoble for the journey home, a grim notice at check-in informed passengers that helmets and boots taken as hand luggage would be 'confiscated and destroyed'. Hang on, there's something wrong here. Surely they have not only not got the right, but they haven't got this wording right? No, it's lost in translation. It should read: 'confiscated and resold by thieving airport staff'. An indignant complaint to a tour operator rep was met with a shrug of almost Gallic intensity: "Yes, sorry about that, mate, nothing we can do about it - you know what the French are like". easyJet, Ryanair and others also play hard at blatant highway robbery. Earlier in the season I travelled via Lyon to Val d'Isère for a few days on business. I planned to ski for only one morning and as I know that easyJet charges an iniquitous and inexcusable £18.50 each way for carrying skis, I left mine at home and rented from Snowberry. But while I was in France one of my kids asked me to pick up his ancient, but much-loved pair of Salomon 1080s. As a dutiful Dad, I packed them in a borrowed ski bag and headed back to Lyon, stoically resigned to spending £18.50 on a pair of skis so knackered they were probably worth less. "That'll be 35 euros, pay over there," said the po-faced easyJet check-in girl, a smile was clearly also extra. "35 euros? But that's 35 quid!" I squealed. "Only 25 euros, if you'd paid online," she gloated. "Hang about, can't I pay online now?" I said, patting my trusty laptop. "Non," she said with the cross-legged emphasis of a nun on a hot date. "Then, I won't take them - I'll leave them behind," I sulked. "If you do that, we will have to charge you to dispose of them," she countered. So yes, I paid. I mean, it's a scandal. Someone should write about this. Taking my pound-impoverished, but ski-rich kids to train on the glacier at Saas Fee last August with Warren Smith I calculated that equipment carriage costs would make it 40 per cent more expensive for us to travel to Zurich with easyJet than with BA. If you've go any sense you'll turn to people like Snowjet or JFL2Go.com who offer reasonably-priced ski flights with no charge at all for carrying skis. But the Dick Turpin technique is not confined to what were once ludicrously referred to as the 'low-cost' airlines. BA and Swiss are, in my experience, above blame in this respect. You turn up with a ski bag and, no-questions-asked, it is treated as free sporting equipment.
Flying with skis. Photo: Ischgl Tourist Office But Air France and Air Canada have both refined a spectacular trick for ruining the end of what might otherwise have been a good holiday. As a family of five you arrive at your departure airport with five pairs of skis in three ski bags. Staff check you in with a smile (with scheduled airlines, smiles are often still provided free). However when you return to Lyon or Vancouver you are told that only one pair of skis per bag is carried free of charge. In excess baggage costs you must pay the price of moat clearance or construction of a Swedish duck house. The more I travel, the more I am learning to hate travelling - not the destination, but airports. OK, so maybe I overdid it a bit this winter - 26 countries in the first three months is enough to test anyone's travel temperament. But it's the extraordinary small-mindedness of some security staff that really gets to me. My friend, musician John Garrison, was at the security desk at Heathrow on his way to New York last winter when he was bewilderingly told to "come this way, sir". "What's the problem?" he asked when they reached an interrogation room. "Your T-shirt," he was told, "You can't board the aircraft wearing that." John looked down at his chest. The picture portrayed the logo of the T-shirt company, a skull shaped like a gun. "But it's not a gun," he spluttered laughingly in disbelief, "it's a T-shirt. I mean, like you can't shoot someone with a T-shirt!" "You'll have to change your clothes," said The Men in Suits, and they weren't joking. "But I can't change because I've already check in my suitcase," said John whose new album is appropriately called Departures. "Then if you want to travel, you'll just have to take it off, Sir," they unisoned. Take if off? Why it's a whole new way of giving ridiculous Heathrow the cold shoulder. "Wait," said John, in a moment of artistic genius, "What if I was to turn it inside out?" A huddled discussion followed between The Men in Suits. "That would do nicely," they chorused.
Johnny in That T-shirt My own recent experience was less dramatic, but equally farcical. I have a metal pin in my left leg, the legacy of an old ski mountaineering accident. Going through security can be a tedious experience, but I submit willingly to it. After all, we don't want folk packing a six-guns in their pants and climbing aboard planes. So, I normally walk through the metal detector holding up my hands for the inevitable hand search. "I have metal in my leg," I say. It's happened only once and, inevitably, in the US. "I see, sir, so can you take it out for me?" came the reply. Skis and airports? I'll stick to camel travel, although unlike idiotic airline staff and stupid security people, their bite tends to be worse than their bark - and they smell something 'orrible. Fowl play in the ski industry - 29/5/2009 13:04by Peter Hardy
Fowl play in the ski industry? Welove2ski editor Peter Hardy waxes woefully about what should be on every sensible skier's mind right now. So, it's time to talk turkey, which is what skiers in America will eat on Thursday November 26 and in Britain on December 25. Provided, of course, that any of us can by then afford to buy the bird and the energy to cook it. The dates are not so very far away. Sadly, I got the first Christmas Stocking Presents brochure through the post today. Equally sadly, I've just put an 89 degree edge on my Lords and booked myself a pair of Salomon Czars in the hope that the snow is going to be just as deep as this past season. But if you haven't already noticed, there's a few problem out there in the ski travel industry... and that depends on what you define as 'a few'. I've no commercial ice-axe to grind, I'm not making a euro out of telling this. But basically, you need to get out there now and book your holiday. Prices aren't going to get any better and availability is going to get much, much worse. Don't think for a moment that you are going to land that less-than-half-price deal for January or March that you managed to wangle at the last minute last season. Tour operators aren't completely stupid - they are not going to take another sickening punch in the orchestra pit, selling at lower-than-cost, two years in a row. The bare fact is that the combination of economic downturn and disastrous-euro means that the number of ski holidays next year will be down by 30%+. Yes, but what does that actually mean? Can't I go skiing? Of course, you can. But it means one-third less flights from the UK to ski destinations and it means one-third less chalet beds than last year. Do the maths. No more cheap deals on the same scale ever, ever again. Try and book a chalet at present with Crystal, First Choice, and Thomson from their Preview brochures and the odds on getting what you initially wanted are marginally worse than putting all your holiday money on black or red at a roulette table. I said in my last blog that, collectively, they've jettisoned half their chalets for the coming winter and I now think I was wrong. Closer to 60% seems a more sensible figure. At a time when they should be promoting their First Edition brochures, they are still busily number-crunching - to the consternation of an industry that looks at times as if it is running in Spring slush. These major companies hold the yardstick by which most small independent operators set their prices. The little guys just don't really know what to do. Those heavyweight brochures should have hit the doormat in April, but now we can't expect them until July. Of course, their position is completely understandable: hang on as long as possible in the hope of making some sense of what the euro will do doing next winter - and at the same time slash costs, and keep on slashing them.
Photo: Skishoot Buy or build-to-let chalet owners are bearing the brunt of these sabre thrusts. They're being told: "Take a 15-30% drop in revenue or we won't work with you". And that's just the lucky ones who are getting the offer they can't refuse. Many others are receiving just a cold Dear Jean email: "due to the financial climate...deep regrets, etc". Ninety chalets 'let go' so far? And that's just the Big Boys. Almost everybody is out there carving the excess fat (and in some cases great slices of lean, too) off their programmes. 10% (Le Ski) is the minimum, while 30% (Scott Dunn) is no longer abnormal. Two operators have kicked the bucket so far. Inevitably, others will follow. The mass market operators want out of chalets altogether - and they'll achieve this over a three-year period, leaving them to concentrate on more cost-effective (and much more boring) chalet-hotels. Actually, following Darwinian theory, this giant cull won't be such a bad thing in the long term: smaller chalet companies that know their onions will benefit, along with their clients. But the medium-term fall-out across the Alps - particularly in the French Alps - will be immense. So far the property market in resorts across the Trois Vallées and in Val d'Isère has been falsely cushioned against the realities of recession. But now I predict that the currently grossly over-inflated prices are going to tumble into freefall. Owners seeking to offload an eight bedroom chalet in Courchevel for 37 million euros and another in Val for 24 million - yes, you did read those figures correctly - are going to have to climb down from their golden cloud. At this supreme end of the market a drop of 30-50% is on the cards. If you've just paid the going price of 10-14 million euros for four/five beds in Courchevel 1850, you've been had. Panicking estate agents here secretly think that prices are set to fall by the same - if not by more. It is, or at least, it's going to be, a great time to buy. 'Retiring' Members of Parliament could do worse than invest their Golden Goodbyes here. So what about hotel holidays? After a ghastly March, French hoteliers are very slowly waking up to the fact that if they completely alienate the British by OTT prices, they won't have a business. Their blinkered mentality led to a handful in the Tarentaise closing their shutters weeks ahead of schedule last season. The Swiss and the Austrians are marginally more switched on and are cutting - or at least containing - prices. North American hotels have been much quicker off the mark to realise the gravity of the downturn and are offering some truly great deals (check out our Deals page) - and they are being backed at the moment by airlines. So what about self-catering? Apartments used to provide the cheapest accommodation, but food and other in-resort costs within the euro zone now make catered chalets a much more price-sensible proposition. For most of us it's become imperative to pay for breakfast and dinner with wine, ski pass, equipment, lessons, and childcare in sterling before you leave home.
Photo: Skishoot However, you've still got the problem of lunch on the mountain. On my Easter family holiday in Vaujany we packed a picnic each day. That's fine in April but not much fun in December. Whole restaurants deserted at dejeuner throughout March have given even the French indigestion: "We've taken the necessary decision not to put up prices at all for next winter," one restaurateur proudly confided to me. It's not enough. Like those MPs, they just don't get the picture do they? So don't b***er around waiting for holiday prices to improve. Book now...and ski through lunch. Carnage and condoms - 13/5/2009 18:43by Peter Hardy
What's going on out there in the Alps? Welove2ski editor Peter Hardy has a snog behind the scenes and finds that anyone planning on another cut-price holiday this coming winter is in for a rude shock. In Europe the snow has mostly melted and the sun and wild flowers are out - along with canny local kids, marmots and foxes who are having a fine old time scavenging beneath chair-lift cables all over the mountainsides. You'd be amazed at what they harvest in May: bars of chocolate, biscuits, gloves, maps, and ski poles are the obvious, along with cigarette packets, cans, and sweet-wrappers. But then there are hats, mobile phones, money, wallets, jewellery, whole backpacks, glasses and even, so I'm told, the occasional glass eye, and knickers and..er...condoms. Remarkable, really, what people manage to take off in a blizzard. But more remarkable what, given the sub-zero temperatures, they manage to put on. Down in the valley at this time of year you'd imagine all would be peace and quiet as hoteliers, restaurateurs, and shop owners head off to Mauritius or the Caribbean to spend their bulging treasure chests. But no, the anguished wails of a thousand chalet owners rent the alpine air. They're leaning over their fret-worked balconies wondering what the hell has happened to the queue of eager tour operators who normally elbow each other out of the way in their efforts to beat a path to their front doors. But this May there's no one in the garden - not even The Man From Crystal is storming up the street, open cheque in hand. For almost two decades this same alpine air has been filled each summer with the sounds of saw and hammer. Farming families in the Trois Vallées and elsewhere have been planting their seasonal cash crop of six-bedroom-six-bathroom rental chalets. Now, interspersed with the cries of the owners, you can hear the thud of the axe falling on their livelihoods. The combination of the Brown-blighted euro and worldwide recession has sapped the life and laughter out of the chalet party. If you went skiing this past winter, you possibly left it to the last minute to book, and thereby saved yourself a fortune. Sh**-struck tour operators were halving January and March in the greatest give-away since The Commons allowed MPs to drain their moats and pay their cleaners on the public purse. OK, so it was expensive when you got there - but the actual holiday was a snip, and the snow was sensational.
Planning the same again? Forget it. You'd better wake up to what's really going on. Britain's 150 ski specialists are in trouble - and a handful of them are at death's door, fighting against the day when they do their final face-plant and are forced to call in the administrator. The number of deaths will be small, but most - to survive - are having to prune their programmes quite dramatically. TUI - that's Thomson, Crystal, and First Choice - will have cut their chalets by as much as 50% by the time they've finalised plans for next season. Supposedly, they've shed 70 in France alone, and right now their contractors are still out there in the mountains cutting away chalets from a portfolio that has taken a decade to acquire. Pick any of the 180-odd chalets 'available' in their massive Preview brochures and you've a double-figure chance of being disappointed when you get on the website or the phone to them. Their First Edition ski brochures for 09/10 should be cluttering up the racks of every travel agent and giving the postman lumbago by now, but they're not even printed - and won't be until July. It looks like they're getting out of chalets altogether - their only constraint is that a lot of their chalets are on three-year contracts. Mathew Prior, TUI's Ski MD, says this isn't exactly true, but told me: "We're taking an aggressive negotiating stance with our owners and dropping those properties where they won't play ball. It's true that we're concentrating more on our chalet-hotels rather than individual chalets." Aggressive negotiating stance? In plain-speak this means that they - and every other tour operator - are asking, no they're telling, chalet owners to drop their prices by 15-30% or they can look elsewhere. Trouble is there isn't much anywhere else to look. True, the Dutch and the Germans are taking up a bit of the slack in Méribel, Courchevel, and Val. But British companies normally account for more than 75% of the French rental chalet market. What's more, it's not just the mass market that's cutting back capacity at such an alarming rate. Scott Dunn is down 30%. YSE has dropped five out of 26 chalets. Skiworld are down 15% and Le Ski 10% - the list goes on and on.
Yes, but what does all this mean to me the skier? What it means is that you've got to plan NOW where you want to go next winter, and with which company. If you want to be sure of getting the holiday of your choice, you can't leave it to December, you can't even leave it to the end of summer. You've got to book NOW. You see, it's not just chalet holidays that are affected by these cuts: charter flights are being reduced. TUI have already dropped their Birmingham-Grenoble service. You should still be able to fly to Austria and France from regional as well as main airports, but the number of flights is expected to drop by a third. Yes, but all these tour operators will end up discounting as usual as the season gets underway, won't they? No, not in the same quantity as we've grown used to over the past decade, because with such restricted programmes they won't need to. You had a great time last year, but they took a hammering that they won't willingly repeat. Oh, and TUI has just dumped Finland off its ski programme. What? All of it? Yes, although First Choice will still offer its Santa packages. Merry Christmas. It may only be May, but it's time to think about that - and beyond. All photos: Skishoot Click here for more on next season's price hikes. Picnic in Vaujany - 9/4/2009 16:52by Peter Hardy
Peter Hardy reports - April 9, 2009 The local Alpe d'Huez weather forecast was wrong about the drop in temperature yesterday, and it was as warm as ever - although it was cloudy all day. Hot it is - actually bl**dy hot - today, which of course is exactly what you expect at this time of year. So, with the ear-pieces off the helmet and factor 30 on the face, we stagger en famille to an early lift - say 10am. Any earlier and you are on a collective hiding-to-nothing unless you like feeling how fast you can take that 89 degree edge off your skis. These, incidentally, currently need to be 100mm-plus underfoot as all waterskiers know.That said, conditions are surprisingly good in the Alpe d'Huez ski area, with the freezing level down to 1800m overnight. Today we hit the infamous Charbonniere at 12.30pm, the exact moment when ice turned to spring snow. I could bore you by telling you that this off-piste run was once Europe's highest coalfield and that a mysterious son of Alpe d'Huez built a mansion on it halfway down after he made a fortune in America. As chalets go it's probably very pleasant but you can only reach it by helicopter, snowmobile - or by skiing down the the wickedly steep itinerary, which is presumably no fun if you are carrying suitcases, shopping, and a new mattress for the mighty master bedroom. But I won't bore you. I've skied this run around 30 times in my life and there has never been anyone at home. The shutters were closed again today and snow was piled deep on the verandas. Maybe he can't afford the helicopter any more. Anyway, we had lots of fun, a peek through the windows, and a picnic on a rock just below.
If we're lucky we'll pick up 20cm of powder on Friday night just in time for a final glorious day before heading for home on Sunday. Click here for our Vaujany resort report. Val d'Isère in a white out - 26/3/2009 17:04by Peter Hardy Welove2ski editor Peter Hardy reports from Val d'Isère - March 26, 2009 Blimey! What March snow madness! In 30 years of skiing in Val I've never seen anything like it at this time of year. Driving back last night after a flying overnight visit to Val, it was still snowing on the Chambery side of Moutiers. With windscreen wipers working furiously, it was time to reflect on my best day's skiing of the year..er, actually, my only day's skiing in 2009, so far. We awoke on Wednesday to a perfect blue sky and all seemed set for a day in the sunshine, when a phone call interrupted a leisurely breakfast in Descent's Big Yeti chalet. "See you at the lift in 10 minutes," said my friend Pat Zimmer from Top Ski, "we've got maybe 90 minutes before it starts snowing again." He was right. After a quick blast down the OK, train back up, a cruise down the Face de Bellevarde, someone turned the lights out. By the time we'd explored Saulire it was snowing - flakes the size of soup plates (well, almost) were floating all around us and clogging up my goggles. Now, one of my co-editors has managed to spend a quite enormous number of days in this record winter drifting down mountainsides - all in the cause of research, you understand. Meanwhile for various reasons, I have sat diligently behind my computer screen and tried to earn an honest living. It's just not fair. But I hadn't realised how unfair until I saw just how much snow is banked up around Espace Killy - at this rate, the mountainside will still be white in June. Runs that I last skied on Boxing Day I could now hardly recognise. Forget lunch. This was a day not to be frittered away in my favourite mountain restaurant. In zero visibility we spent six hours drifting through the powder - so heavy was the snowfall that it was hard to tell at times whether we were on or off piste. That was my yesterday. Today I'm back in Hampshire behind my computer screen once again. Did yesterday really happen? My whole body says it did. Every muscle aches as if I have just run back-to-back marathons. In the garden, daffodils dance in a cold, damp breeze. I tell myself that this skiing business is over-rated. No, it's bl**dy well not. Snow expense spared in Val d'Isère - 29/12/2008 18:00by Peter Hardy If it doesn't snow between now at the Alpine World Championships in February I know a handful of pisteurs in Val d'Isère who will be extremely grateful. No sooner do they get hosepipes out on to the Face de Bellevarde and the new women's downhill course on Solaise, than it starts to snow - again. Snow in one form or another is now guaranteed for the Blue Riband events. The only remaining snow problem is whether, on the big day, there will be too much of it.
At New Year I've never seen my 'home' resort in better shape. For the past week I've cruised my favourite runs across Espace Killy without a rock in site. L, Mathis, Sache, Tommeuse, OK/Orange - they are all skiing at their February best. So why - at the end of another happy family holiday - do I have a haunted look on my face? It's the money. Not only is the exchange rate horrendous, but in-resort prices have also risen to quite extortionate rates. I estimate that a standard supermarket shop now costs three times what it does in the UK. After making use of your £220 lift pass, lunch in a mountain restaurant is an ordeal-by-euros. The Plat du Jour in the Folie Douce self-service is £16.50, Spaghetti Bolognese £13.50. A bottle of basic Côtes du Rhone in a restaurant is £21.50, and a small beer £5. Dick Yates-Smith, founder of Dick's Tea Bar said: "We've been through bad times and good times - now it seems that we are the paupers of Europe once again." Restaurants are already suffering. Normally for Christmas Day you have to book a table for lunch at Les Tufs at La Daille at least a week in advance. This year it was half-empty. The story was a similar one at other restaurants across the mountain. I'm sure the World Championshiops will be a huge success. I even believe that local French heroine, Ingrid Jacquemod who has been having such a difficult season, will come right on the day and take gold for France before her home crowd and British-born mother, Jane. But what's the point in having the best ski resort in the world, if we Brits - who provide 35% of its business - can't afford to go there? Click here for our Val d'Isère resort report. 1000m descents in 50cm fresh powder - 29/11/2008 13:17by Peter Hardy welove2ski editor, Peter Hardy, won the office sweepstake and travelled out to Val d'Isère for the opening day of the season...with some considerable reluctance we post his report. Holy Mackerel! You have to ski this to believe it: repeated 1000m descents in France in 50cm of fresh powder in NOVEMBER. Actually, if you're sitting at home or in the office you may want to stop reading this right now. I expect my fellow editors at welove2ski are green with envy. But just because you have the misfortune not to be here, that shouldn't stop me enjoying myself, should it?
© Pat Zimmer/Top Ski Yes, I hate to tell you that I've just had the most sensational and snow-rich first day of the season of my entire life. At times it was like heli-skiing without the need for a helicopter. Dedicated visitors may remember that last November I wallowed in the white stuff in a white-out Sölden. But that was survival stuff on a high glacier. This was pure, unadulterated fun beneath a perfect blue sky in a resort that is almost entirely open. In fact virtually the entire Espace Killy is up and running. Back in the chalet now, I'm still grinning. Actually, I'll be grinning in my sleep tonight. Paddy O'Powder, our normally chirpy Courmayeur blogger who had driven over to join me for the opening day, was almost at a loss for words in either English or Italian - a rare occasion. Hopefully he'll find them by next weekend when he starts his regular reports for welove2ski from the Mont Blanc massif. I've been coming to Tignes and Val in November for 30 years and for the past ten I've spent much of the month working on the Grande Motte. Over the decade we've had OK conditions, we've had good conditions - but we've never EVER seen anything like this. Our guide, Pat Zimmer of Top Ski who has lived in Val since he gave up racing over 30 years ago said: "I can't remember a better fortnight in November. It just doesn't get any better than this."
© Pat Zimmer/Top Ski If you happened to awaken from a witch-induced sleep that lasted a year or two...and stumbled out into the mid-mountain sunlight from where you have been curled up in a corner of the Folie Douce, you'd imagine it was mid-February. Yes, conditions are really that good - and they're here to stay. Today, it was a coolish -10C with wind chill. Mindful of the looming Alpine Ski World Championships which take place here in February, Val has been guarding its bumper crop of snow with extreme care. As soon as the first flakes fell earlier in the month A fleet of snowcats were out on Solaise creating a base. Normally no grooming is done here until the final run-up to the season, and with predictable results. If winds reach gale force - as they often do at this time of year - pistes are stripped overnight back to bare rock. But that was not allowed to happen. Even the notoriously rocky Face de Bellevarde is entirely stone-free. I could tell you how at one stage I managed 80 consecutive turns in light fluffy powder before stopping to admire my tracks. I could also tell you that at one point I had to climb back up 100m, sinking in delicious snow right up to my thighs, after temporarily losing the bottom half of one of my telescopic touring poles. I could tell you how from the top of Tommeuse we floated all the way down to Tignes Val Claret on an almost deserted Piste H, which was coated in a couple of centimetres of flattering white stardust.
© Pat Zimmer/Top Ski I could tell you how we powered down the new Women's Downhill Course on Solaise with the kind of crunch underfoot that the racers will pray for on the big day. I could tell you that it's going to snow tonight and, with a bit of luck, we'll have another 20 centimetres by sunrise. But, I'm not going to do that. I don't want to make you jealous. For more information on Val d'Isère check out our Val d'Isère resort report. Well. That's it then - or almost. - 4/5/2008 17:40by By Peter Hardy, welove2ski editor Europe is winding down - the last lift systems at the end of a truly fantastic ski season. We'll have to wait a few weeks yet for the South Hemisphere to come to life - no resorts are open there at present. Over - but not really. There's still a lot of lift-access skiing to be had in the Alps and much more if you're prepared to put on skins and climb like a real skier used to before we all got soft and demanded heated gondolas and covered chairs. Check out our snow overview to see which lift systems are still open in the Alps and Rockies. It's a dog's life - 31/3/2008 05:38by By Peter and Felice Hardy Peter and Felice Hardy discover an unspoilt resort in the Canadian Rockies. Writing this is a big mistake. Just occasionally we come across a resort we want to keep to ourselves. Jasper is one of those. We've been to Lake Louise maybe half a dozen times and loved it. But until now we've never driven the extra two hours up the Icefields Parkway to the town of Jasper and the separate ski resort of Marmot Basin. Brian Rode, vice-president of Marmot, claims that 60 per cent of British visitors who make it up here return the following year. That says it all. Firstly, the drive offers some of the world's most spectacular mountain scenery. The tumbling seracs of the Columbia Icefield alone are more than a match for even the Mer de Glace. The town, when you finally get here, is about the size of Banff, although it's more laid back and much less commercial. But we've come here to ski not shop. Marmot Basin is a 30-minute drive away (if you stick to the frustratingly low speed limits around here). The hill is small but sweet, with enough gladed runs and alpine terrain to keep anyone happy for a few days. Controlled gates take you into some steepish backcountry. They've had precious little new snow here in the past four weeks, but the base is holding up well in the kind of double-figure sub-zero temperatures you expect in the Canadian Rockies in January rather than early April. Jasper/Marmot is the kind of resort that thankfully has not, so far, gone to the dogs. The same cannot be said for Canmore at the Calgary end of the National Park, which we also popped into for a morning. Apart from having one of the world's largest Nordic centres, Canmore is also home to Snowy Owl Sled Dog Tours. If you've never mushed, this is the place to learn. Nominally, we were in charge of our own six-dog team as they raced for an hour through undulating woodland and skimmed across a frozen lake with a bald-eagle hugging the thermals overhead
In reality, Chester and Maui, our lead huskies, called all the shots except for a little downhill breaking to stop the sledge running into the team. Up at Jasper, it's snowing outside the window and a powder day for tomorrow looks promising. It's a dog's life, this skiing business. Death of the half-pipe? - 27/3/2008 09:41by By welove2ski editors, Felice and Peter Hardy Peter and Felice Hardy noticed that something pretty important seemed to be missing from the scenery as they rode the quad-chair up from Whiskyjack Lodge yesterday. "So where's the terrain park?" we asked. Lake Louise, as we've written on countless occasions has one of the biggest and most exciting terrain parks in the world with Goliath-size kickers and the kind of super-pipe of opium dreams. "It's gone," said Andrew, our ski school guide-for-the-day, "and we won't be building another one." Gone? Yes, lost to health-and-safety. If you hadn't already noticed, terrain parks are disappearing all over Canada. Where next? You might well ask. Something pretty important and also very strange is happening - and there's not much we can do about it. After 20 years of fun, the threat of litigation is destroying parkland across the country at the speed of the Brazilian rainforest. So far those at Lake Louise, Fernie, Kimberley, Mont-Sainte-Anne, and Stoneham have all been felled - destinations all owned by Resorts of the Canadian Rockies. Of course, there's more to come. We hear Whistler's worried, so is Colorado. Lake Louise insists that parks are dangerous and that the threat of being sued by injured riders and skiers has now become untenable. The resort claims to have cut its park injury rate by a remarkable 70 per cent this season. We've never heard the park figures calculated for Europe. Lake Louise's fantastic terrain park has been replaced by a much more benign rail park with strictly limited access. First you have to register with the resort and - you've guessed it - sign a waiver. You also have to pay CD$5, although this is handed back to you in the form of a food-and-drink voucher. In theory, but not necessarily in practice, you also have to swipe your card at the gate.
It's a shame, but this sorry state of affairs - serious though it is - does not detract from what we consider to be one of the world's most under-rated resorts. The budget image of Banff-Lake Louise in recent years has all but eclipsed the quality of the terrain. It's been bitterly cold here this week, with temperatures slipping as low as -22C, but clear blue skies and 20 fresh centimetres underfoot have warmed hearts, if not fingers and toes. The Back Side here is nothing short of brilliant, with the Platter lift giving access to some serious chutes off a heavily corniced ridge of the kind that makes you gulp before you go for it - tracked but delicious powder and barely a rock in sight. On the Front Side, the men's downhill course proves to be high octane fuel for boy and girl racers. This is skiing at its North American best. Tomorrow we're doing a little dog-sledding before tailing it for 3.5 hours up to seriously rural Jasper - provided the bears don't get us. The First Bear of the Year, a fully grown grizzly came out of hibernation just five miles north of here a week ago. Parks Canada says: "Hikers and cyclists should travel in groups and make lots of noise to alert the bears." Those of us on skis will, we can assure you, be doing the same. The further adventures of Glen Plake in Verbier - 17/3/2008 19:38by By Peter Hardy, welove2ski editor Welove2ski editor, Peter Hardy, teamed up with Glen Plake in Verbier. "It kinda looks straight, but it ain't" said Glen Plake, gazing out of gondola window high above Verbier. The American trick skier and video star, sporting a beanie and long hair today instead of his trademark Mohican hairstyle, was not talking about gambling in his native South Lake Tahoe but about Bloodline, the new retro-thin ski that he is developing with Elan. One of first five pairs was sitting comfortably, all 191cm of it, in the gondola basket (a ski that fits!). "Fat skis have their place, but they're just a passing fad. This is the real thing. I want to be in the powder - not on top of it."
Kimberly, his wife, had heard it all before. The previous evening she'd threatened to don jumping skis with an alpine binding that 'should be just magic in powder'. But when the day dawned blue with 20 fresh centimetres underfoot, she chickened out - opting instead for a 180cm Bloodline with just 60mm at the waist. Talk all you like on the lift, but the proof is on the piste and - in this case - off it. Glen is two times World Hot Dog Champion, while Stu Brass was twice British Snowboard Champion and remains one of the great riders of all time. Bérangère Moroc from France was fresh from winning the Nissan FreeRide de Tignes. In this company, you don't really want to catch an edge and make a fool of yourself. Bérangère rocketed off a cornice into a field of virgin powder and the Bloodline duo needed no encouragement to chase her. We took a collective deep breath and followed. Glen's lost none of that magic touch that has made him a world class skier for the past 25 years, laughing all the way through the powder on his skinny skis. Welove2ski editor Peter Hardy put on a helmet camera and teamed up with him for a ride down the Nissan All Mode Run - no one seemed quite sure who was filming who, but that's Peter in the green pants... Verbier blog - 13/3/2008 07:41by By welove2ski editors, Felice and Peter Hardy Welove2ski editors, Felice and Peter Hardy are in Verbier, where it snowed non-stop all day yesterday and most of last night. It's 7am, there's a blue sky above Mont Fort and we're off to play with Glen Plake in 30cm of fresh powder. "Fat skis are for pussies," he said last night over a few glasses of wine in Ski Verbier's flagship Chalet Cheyenne. If you don't know Glen by name, you'll know him by sight - the enfant terrible of American skiing, the video star with that trademark Mohican haircut. Glen's been bouncing off moguls and skipping under ropes just ahead of the ski patrol in his native Lake Tahoe for 20 years. But these days he's a poacher-turned-gamekeeper, a colourful ambassador for US skiing and a key component of the pro-circuit. He's in Verbier for this weekend's Nissan O'Neil Xtreme freeride competition. He'd swapped his Mohican for a top hat when we met up to discuss the new skis he's designing with Elan and boots with Dalbello. "The trouble is with fat skis that you ride on top of the snow. I like to be in that deep powder, not above it. That's why you'll find me on my 191cm moguls skis tomorrow and their just 60mm under the foot. "Why mogul skis in deep powder?" You may well ask - they're the only skis I seem to have with me right now, but what the hell, they'll be just as much fun as anything else. "Now Kimberly, here," he said gesturing in the direction of his beautiful Texan wife, "she's going to be riding a pair of 180cm jump skis that I put an alpine binding on. We never tried them in powder - but they should be good." Kimberly smiled happily in agreement. It's been a snowy or wet week in Verbier until now - depending on whether you were trying to find your way down from Attelas in a blizzard or standing in the Place Centrale wishing you had a brolly and that your £350 jacket was as weatherproof as the manufacturer claimed. But it chilled down overnight, bringing a white covering to the roofs and what should be phenomenal conditions on top
Yesterday we braved the blizzard until past midday before going into a lunch in the L'Olympique mountain restaurant at the top of the Funitel gondola that sensibly lasted much of the afternoon. But, today's going to be full on fun. Are we on retro skinny skis? Are we hell. Felice is on her pink Salomon Temptresses and Peter is mounted on his treasured Zag Bigs. The Zags are 84mm at the waist and 134mm on the nose - but he wishes he had wider. But like, Glen, they're the only skis he's got with him. We'll let you know how we get on.
From Samoëns to Flaine - 1/2/2008 12:33by By Peter and Felice Hardy, two of the welove2ski editors After skiing in over 500 resorts around the world, it's not often we rave about a resort that's new to us. But two in one month! Well, it's one helluva season. Firstly it was Revelstoke Mountain Resort in BC and now little Samoëns linked to Flaine in French Grand Massif. We've skied over here from Flaine many times in the past, but never actually explored the village. It's low - 720m - and there's not much snow in the village, but plenty higher up. It's an old village which has got bundles of character. But the best bit is the three-star Hotel Neige et Roc, the quintessential rural French hotel that you hope to stumble upon but, these days, so rarely do. Thanks Peak Retreats for finding it for us. It also has truly outstanding cuisine. We dined on poached foie gras, fillets of local trout with caramelised mushrooms, venison, and a five different deserts served together on a slate plate - all washed down with a couple of local wines. On the following morning we skied over to Flaine to watch the 50th British Schoolgirls Races run by the Ladies Ski Club. Some 150 girls from 50 schools from all over the country take part in slalom, GS, and parallel slalom races. Last year snow conditions were so poor that it wasn't possible to stage a giant slalom.
Of course, this year it was a different story. We had brilliant blue skies and a perfect basic underfoot, yet it was warm enough to sit outside on the terrace at Les Chalets de Michet for lunch. Flaine is undergoing a renaissance at present as the new Intrawest village takes shape and for 2009-10 there'll be a four-star de luxe hotel that comes from the same stable as Les Fermes de Marie in Megève. But for the moment, the best place to stay in Flaine is with Erna Low in the Pierre et Vacances Résidence up at Flaine Fôret, where the apartments are far more spacious than the average French shoebox. On the training day we escaped pony-club-on-ice to ski out of the main Flaine bowl to Morillon and Samoens. The whole area has spectacular scenery and some really quite excellent skiing on open undulating terrain. In powder conditions the off-piste here is some of the most exciting in the region.
No cup for our 12-year-old daughter Izzi this year, but her team, St Swithun's, did well. She finished the two slalom courses in 6th place for her age group, just ahead of Sir Steve Redgrave's daughter, Nathalie, who was skiing for the Kandahar Ski Club team. Verbier white-out - 22/1/2008 22:48by By Peter Hardy Two of welove2ski editors have been tree-skiing in Verbier. The snow has been coming down all day today which is what we like to see. Despite a stupendous base, the pistes and indeed the itineraries were getting a bit tired with too many rollercoaster bumps on the traverses. Mind you, Mont Gelé is open and skiing well - it needs a helluva lot of snow to cover the rocks and only the occasional one was peeping through when we skied it in glorious sunshine on Monday. Mont-Fort was barely bumped up and today's new snow should provide the perfect finish. Up high, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, but it was better lower down through the trees. The sun finally peeped through at 4pm - can't wait for tomorrow.
The town's moderately busy right now. We hit Coco's, the new nightclub last night and sipped what is claimed to be the world's most expensive cocktail - Krug Rosė Champagne and Hennessey Ellipse Cognac contained in a kitsch chalet ice sculpture at a cool £4,000. You do get life membership of the club along with the drink. To me it tasted a bit like Tizer, but we weren't paying and tonight we're heading for our old favourite, Casbah. Fresh from Tignes - 30/11/2007 18:19by By Peter Hardy (via his powder-hungry fellow editor Sean Newsom) This is just in from Tignes, where fellow welove2ski editor Peter Hardy was skiing the glacier earlier today. "The Tignes weathermen described conditions on the glacier today as "beau et doux" and fine and sweet was just what it was: we had one of those mornings when you're grinning so much your face hurts. "Up at 3400m everything was open, the thermometer hovered around the -3C mark, and the sun - against all predictions - shone from a cloudless blues sky. The powder of last weekend has gone and the occasional icy patch is developing but this is still skiing at its most sensational, on perfectly groomed runs. "We took a couple of runs from the top all the way down through 1400m vertical to ValClaret at speed and without stopping. I'm testing a pair of Elan Magfire 12, a great all-mountain ski that performs extraordinarily well off-piste and seems to have plenty of bite on the hardpack. The only problem is that even without the bindings, they weigh a ton - fine if you live in a resort, but not much fun to carry around. "I have to say that by lunchtime my legs were urgently suggesting that we'd done enough for the day and an afternoon business appointment provided an almost welcome excuse to quit a little early. After all, there's a lot of skiing to come in a season that is shaping up nicely around here. "Mont Blanc was wearing its hat of cloud, a sure sign of bad weather to come, but it has yet to arrive. The latest local forecast suggests the high pressure will collapse on Sunday afternoon, giving way to a wet front that should bring a reasonable covering above 2000m. Of course, this is not going to do much good to the lower French resorts. "Val d'Isère is managing to open on Saturday with strictly limited piste skiing above Le Fornet. But we are assured that the lift link (but not necessarily the piste) will be open to Tignes. "You should be here..." (Check out our Snow Overview for more on the white stuff across the Alps and North America. For more information on Tignes check out our Tignes resort report.) Powder on the Grande Motte - but where's the snow in Val d'Isère? - 27/11/2007 18:53by By Peter Hardy (via his powder-hungry fellow editor Sean Newsom) Wondering where to ski at the moment? Can we suggest Tignes? We've just had in this latest report from welove2ski editor Peter Hardy, who was skiing on the glacier again yesterday. "I'm on the first train up the Grande Motte glacier in search of more powder, and I can't wait to get up there. Tignes is skiing at its most delicious: conditions this week are the best I've experienced here in November for more than ten years.
"We've been attacking the full vertical - all 1400m of it - again and again, and by the end of the day even the strongest legs turn to spaghetti. The piste is perfectly groomed and there's not a stone in sight. Off-piste, there's 30 to 40cm of light, dry powder sparkling in the sunshine. "That's the good news. The bad news is that it's much too warm for this time of year - around freezing point at the top of the funicular and as high as +14C at lunchtime in the valley. While the glacier is in great shape, high temperatures have played havoc with the snow lower down. "From my window in Val d'Isère early this morning there's no longer a trace of snow on road or roofs. The bottom of the OK downhill course looks distinctly patchy. A week ago they were making snow furiously and had created a giant stash near the finish, but that has now entirely disappeared - they made the mistake of spreading it too soon. "Sadly, unless the mercury drops and we have a dramatic storm in the coming days, I can't see Val opening on schedule this coming weekend. As in politics, a week is a long time in skiing. The euphoria of what looked like the perfect start to a potentially vintage season is now past and resorts across France are in serious need of a fresh major snowfall. "Meanwhile I'm heading back up on to that glacier. Come and join me you can! In Tignes it just doesn't get any better than this in November...or even in February, come to that." Peter will be glad to know - as we all are - that the weather is set to turn this weekend, with at least two fronts due in from the North Atlantic (check out our Snow Overview for details). They should bring the desperately-needed snow! For details of the Tignes ski clinics, click here.
Half a metre of powder on the Tignes glacier. - 25/11/2007 13:17by By Peter Hardy (via Sean Newsom) - welove2ski editors. As we've been reporting in our Snow Overview this week, much of the Alps has had to take a rain check on winter - literally, in some cases, as the rain washed the snow off the streets in the more northerly resorts of France. Our advice all week has been to return to Plan A for the early season, which is to aim high, and ski the glaciers - a piece of advice satisfyingly validated by the report we've just had in from fellow editor Peter Hardy.
He's out in Tignes, above, taking part in our November clinics (read about them here), and he scored powder yesterday - as this picture will testify! "Drifting down the Grande Motte glacier yesterday in half a metre of fluffy, dry powder I spared a thought for anyone back home in the cold and the rain," he writes. "It was just the one thought, however, because I was otherwise much too busy enjoying myself. "In 12 years of spending much of November in Val and Tignes that was my best day ever - although today (Sunday) promises to be at least as good. We were skiing a full 1400m vertical and at least half of it was off-piste in the kind of snow you dream of in February. "The weather was pretty fair yesterday with the temperature only -1C. at the top of the funicular. Because other resorts are open in France it was also remarkably uncrowded and we had the glacier pretty much to ourselves. We've had had a dusting of snow overnight in Val and I'm expecting the same sort sun and clouds today and more superb skiing. "I'd like to write a longer blog but it will have to wait until this evening...I'm heading for the first lift." We're going to be hearing lots more from Peter over the next week or so. Though if he carries on like this we may well tell him to shut up... If you'd like some suggestions about where to late November/early December, check out our article, "Where to Ski Now". And don't forget to keep an eye on our Snow Overview - there's snow forecast for the beginning of the week in Austria, and then the possibility of big storms in France next weekend.
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