Where to Ski And Snowboard -

Spring in the Three Valleys

26th March 2012, by Dave Watts

Great grooming of most pistes made morning skiing delightful – so long as you knew where to go

Thursday, Friday and Saturday were the last three days of my week-long stay in Courchevel 1650, which is at one end of the vast 3 Valleys ski area. And the weather was sunny on all three – and hot enough by Friday to force me to discard my helmet and ski without even a hat or headband all day. Sunny skies and warm temperatures are forecast throughout the coming week too.

Such conditions make choosing where to ski extremely important. On piste, heading for groomed pistes in the morning was essential – and preferably north-facing ones which get little sun so don’t turn to slush in the afternoon (such as the top runs above 1650 or Val Thorens) or east facing ones which soften up quickly in morning sun (such as those on the far side of Méribel). There is apparently a smart phone app that tells you which pistes have been groomed overnight in the 3 Valleys; but for dinosaurs like me and my friends who don’t have smart phones, it meant studying the grooming lists posted at the main lift stations carefully (which only cover pistes maintained by the local lift company not the whole of the 3 Valleys). But before we discovered these we made a couple of very unpleasant ventures down rock hard ungroomed pistes. Resorts should do more to tell you (maybe at the top of each piste) which runs have been groomed. Méribel and Courchevel used to hand out US-style grooming maps with this info on – but no longer. Beaver Creek in Colorado has a great system of boards listing each piste with lights to indicate whether each is open and whether it was groomed last night.

Off-piste, having a guide is essential and they should be able to find you delightful snow and catch slopes just as the sun has melted the top surface to delightful spring snow.

This is the start of an off-piste run from Mont Vallon in Méribel, where a Russian was killed by an avalanche last season and not found till the snow melted in the spring.

We had a great three days, starting early and taking a late lunch, followed by a little more skiing on north-facing slopes when everything else was slushy.

Courchevel has sculptures by up-and-coming artists scattered around the slopes – but, strangely, no explanation of what they are or who they are by

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