Explore europe in a campervan

We’ve been up the mountain a grand total of three times now since arriving nearly three weeks ago!  There has been no more than a sprinkle of snow and conditions are generally not great.  I’m sure if we were here for a week’s holiday we would be making the most of it, but there’s no need to ride the ice every day when we have months ahead of us.

Our first run was (as you can see in the photo) rather late in the day to say the least.  We had to take the gondola up from Les Prodains after buying our lift passes, because the two chair lifts were both closed.  The short trip to the only chair lift open, which takes you half way up the Arare run was rock solid ice with barely any snow at all - nice little scrape for the first time of board-on-feet this year!  The Arare piste was not actually as bad as expected, with only patches of scratchy ice, and Simon even managed to get lots of side-of-piste jumps in.  Crot (the ‘home run’ down to Les Prodains car park) is also passable, as long as you watch out for rocks on the piste - usually a late-season feature.

The next time out we popped over to one of our favourite runs in previous years - Prolays which runs down the right hand side of the Stash and has great spots for jumps onto the piste which suit most abilities.  I’m not even trying to leave the ground yet and can honestly say I have never been on that run in such a hard, icy state - not much fun at all, although one consolation is a lack of moguls - the snow’s just too hard!

Yesterday we took the Supermorzine gondola up the hill, in the hope of a better slope.  The top of the Zore piste up there is actually closed due to lack of snow.  We headed over to Avoriaz - with the going so icy at least the long flat piste was running fast - in warmer conditions it can be hard to keep going on a snowboard.  This time we took the run the other side of the Stash - Combe a Florets which goes all the way down to the bottom of the Ardent bubble.  There are some good jumps on the side of the piste here too - for those brave enough!  I found it a bit too rock-hard and scratchy.

So in summary - I’m told it may be better to be on skis in these conditions, but it is passable for a snowboard.  There are still lots of people in the Chappelle snow park hitting the jumps and riding rails, but I reckon impact shorts are a must.   We have had some beautiful sunny (but cold) days so I’m sure that those arriving for week long holidays will have found enough snow on the hills to keep them busy, while enjoying blue skies… and the bars and restaurants are probably doing very well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2011 at 10:38 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.