Explore europe in a campervan

Portes du Soleil is a massive area of interlinked ski resorts. We only seem to board the Avoriaz resort with the odd visit to Les Crosets for some kiting. So we thought before our time runs out we would plan a route that would take us to new areas. As I love snowparks and Portes du Soleil has quite a few, we thought we would combine visiting new areas with visiting as many snowparks as we could in one day. After looking at the piste map we decided 7 snowparks would be the maximum we could cram into one days snowboarding.

We had an early start, 10:30 it was, which is very early in our books and has only been achieved 1 or 2 times! We set off from the Prodains car park, the first leg of the journey was to get over to Switzerland via the Arare snowpark at the top of Avoriaz. We have been past the Arare snowpark before but since it’s an advanced park with massive rails and jumps I have never done anything other than watch. The task set however was to visit 7 snowparks and you can’t really say you’ve been to a snowpark if you haven’t at least ridden through it and hit a rail or a jump, so I had to find a rail or jump within my ability.

So there it is: a flat-down rail. Before this day the only rail of this kind I had ridden was in the little kids’ park in Avoriaz which was 6ft long. So it was a little scary but required in order to complete the task. The rail wasn’t too bad but I did wipeout at the end.

Once over in Les Crosets, Switzerland we headed over to the snowpark des Crosets. This is also a massive park where all the jumps and rails are for expert riders. So this time I chose to hit the hip, which is as scary as you want it to be. You can go slowly and hit it low and you’ll be fine or you can go fast and get big air. I went as fast as I dared and got some air… then wiped out

Our next destination was Morgins which is also in Switzerland. This was new territory; we had never been any further than Les Crosets in the past. The pistes in Morgins seemed to all slope to one side which wasn’t very nice and most lifts were drags. The first of which was a T-bar drag lift, we both got pulled along by one T-bar, got ¾ up the slope when the T-bar started slipping and we fell to the ground in a heap. We decided to hike the rest of the way rather than go through that again.

In Morgins we visited the Edge snowpark. It now became apparent that this wasn’t the best time to visit parks. Since lots of snow had been falling during the previous days the park was very powdery and you couldn’t see many of the jumps. So my only option in this park was to hit a box that was poking up through the powder.

I thought I had thoroughly checked everything over before I went on the box, but when I did try going along it I found out different. As soon as my board came into contact with the rail it refused to budge any further, my momentum flung me over the top like I was doing a cartwheel! The picture makes it look like I’m doing some kind of extreme nose slide trick; the next image would in fact show me in a pile on the end of the rail! I fell on my arm but no damage so on we proceeded.

We now had to board down the mountain to get a bus across the village to the neighbouring mountain of Super Chatel. The pistes at Super Chatel were much better than Morgins; these were more like what we’re used to in Avoriaz. The park on Super Chatel is called Smooth Park. This park was much better than the last one we visited. It had many jumps, rails, boxes, a wall ride and a hip. Somewhere I would like to visit more often but it’s a little too far. I went on loads of things in this park but the camera decided to run out of batteries so it wasn’t taking images very well.

Once at the bottom of Chatel we had to get yet another bus, this time to Linga. When we were on the bus it was around 3:45 so time was running out. The piste map says you need to be on the Linga lift at 3:15 in order to get back over to Avoriaz! We were only slightly worried though as we know those times are very conservative.

So, we got off the bus and made our way on the lifts to the top of Linga. Linga is part of Chatel and adjoins Avoriaz. By now the wind was howling, the sky heavy and our legs tired. The next park on our schedule was Happy Park, we went past it on the lift but the time was now 4:20, the piste map indicated leaving at 3:45 to get back to Avoriaz, but we were pretty sure that we could get back over and home as long as we got on the Plaine Dranse lift before 4:45. So that would leave us just over 20 minutes to get down a red run, go into the park and photograph me on something, get the lift back up, then board down a red piste to the Plaine Dranse lift. We decided this wasn’t humanly possible so headed straight for the lift to get comfortably over into Avoriaz.

When we got to the lift it turned out that it didn’t close until 5:00 so we could have had 10-15 minutes longer and possibly visited Happy Park, but it was too late now. By the time we got to the Chapelle snowpark in Avoriaz it was around 5:15. All lifts are closed by 5:30 but we know we can get home from here without lifts.

I know the Chapelle Park quite well and there are loads of jumps and things that are well within my abilities. I just quickly did the barrel jump and we then made our way to the Trashers snowpark just so we could tick off another park.

I hit the flat-down box in the Trashers Park, its nothing compared to the one I did earlier in Arare Park, which was good since my legs couldn’t take much more. Once we got to our usual home run it was jointly decided that we would get the cable car down as we were both too tired to do the home run.

So in summary the Portes du Soleil is a massive area, in the end we only managed to do 6 out of the 7 parks we planned to visit. There is suppose to be more than 10 parks in the Portes du Soleil area but surely no one could do them all in one day?!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Diary, Snowboarding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.