Val d'Isere Snow Report: 10th January 2012

It was a beautiful day today, here in Espace Killy. The skies were clear and blue and the pistes were in fantastic condition. The off-piste may be windblown and tracked out, but we don’t mind when the pistes are perfectly groomed. Today was a day for Hi-viz mirrored lenses and losing a few layers.

I felt like I had been riding everywhere today, we went right down to the bottom of Tignes Les Brevieres. The snow was fantastic all the way down too! You can pick a steep-ish red, a snaky blue or head off down the black and pray there are no moguls because it’s super fast! You can stop at the bottom for something to eat, or a hot drink too if you need a break in one of the many little restaurants down there. It is best skied around midday if you wish to stay in the sunshine though, as the shadows creep over very quickly in the afternoon, and the chairlift out can seem very long and cold.

As well as Tignes Les Brevieres, we visited the airbag in Tignes le Lac, on the Palafour piste, and Lanches on the way up the Grande Motte (that is the perfect piste for blasting down!) Back in Val, and we were enjoying hard, fast, but still grippy pistes all over the shop. The runs down to La Daille were smooth but still offered enough traction so that you felt like you could stop. The barriers are still up from the Europa cup, so you can’t cut between pistes quite as easily as normal, although the race piste will be really fast when they let us back on it.

The off-piste skiing conditions are varied, if you know where to go you can still find the odd powder stash, but the majority of areas are windswept and hard. Where there is soft snow, there is likely to be some wind slabs and very weakly bonded snow after the storm so be careful out there! The Henry’s Avalanche Talk web page is a great place to start and one of their talks should be a must, especially if you are in Val d’Isere, and intending to ski off piste. The dates and times of these are advertised on their web pages too.

The weather forecast is for this beautiful sunshine to continue, at least for the next couple of days, with temperatures to stay cool, and the wind chill factor to increase into the week, so take extra layers with you if you can, and remember to put sunscreen on.

Enjoy the bluebird skies!