Chamonix Snow Report: 19th March 2007
The sunny, warm weather of yesterday and all last week seems an age away today as we enjoy another powder day in Chamonix. Last night the rain fell hard in town, but high up on the ski areas it was falling as snow. By this morning I couldn't hear the rain on the roof any longer. That could have meant one of two things: it had stopped raining or it had turned to snow. Luckily it was the latter. There wasn't a great deal of snow on the ground in our garden but it was enough to make the place look more like a ski resort than it has done for the last week or two.
We headed up to Brevent for some skiing and snowboarding in shin-deep powder of the highest quality. I really hadn't expected it to be so good: somehow the warm weather last week made it seem inconceivable that temperatures would drop to below freezing again and that the snow would ever be so light and powdery as it was today. The day started off well with a fantastic run down the Charlanon bowl. We stayed to the skier's right of the piste and had a large untracked area to ourselves – amazingly no one had skied there yet. The new snow was a good 40cm deep and visibility was still fairly good. The second leg of the run down to the Liaison cable car was more tracked out, which forced us to look a little harder for fresh tracks but we found some without too much searching.
By the time we made it to Flegere the cloud was starting to build up again and the light was becoming flatter, so making it harder to read the surface of the snow. Still, we had a reasonably good run through the Lachenal bowl. We stayed high on the skier's left of the bowl and had some good turns at the top although it was only around 20–30cm deep and the lower we went in the bowl the heavier it became. The sun must have been on the snow here a little as it felt much less powdery than the stuff we'd ridden in the Charlanon bowl 45 minutes previously.
We took a few more runs off of Index, heading out below the Floria lift where it was fairly untracked – maybe only 5-10 people there before us. We noticed a crater from an avalanche bomb that hadn't triggered a slide. It was good to know that the snow was solid but less good to know that the pisteurs thought it worthy of a bomb. That aside the snow was good there, as powdery as in the Charlanon bowl and deeper if anything. There were a few good-sized cornices that we dropped before heading down to the top of the Chavannes chairlift. We continued off piste below the Chavannes lift but the snow was less deep and was heavier with a few icy lumps being clipped nearer the Trappe piste.
As the afternoon wore on visibility rapidly worsened and the snowfall became heavy: we were quickly being covered in centimetres of snow as we rode up the Trappe chairlift and could barely see the pistes below, but I did notice that the snow-measuring stick at Flegere read 245cm. We headed in a little early at around 3:30pm as did many others and there was the usual queue for the Brevent gondola down to Chamonix. The queue was moving quickly enough so we only had to wait about 20 minutes in the heavy snow. When we arrived in Chamonix it was lightly snowing and it's still snowing very lightly as I look out of the window. The temperature's just below freezing here at 6:30pm and it looks like, with some more snow forecast for this evening, tomorrow is going to be another excellent powder day.
Useful Information
Useful Links
Additional snow and weather information provided, with thanks, by meteo.chamonix.com and the Tourist Office
Piste Maps for Chamonix (pdf format), Les Houches (jpg format), Cross-country skiing (pdf format), and Mountain-bike trails (pdf format)
Current status for opening of Pistes & Lifts
Chamonix Webcam Index
Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research
French Avalanche Research Institute
Meteo France - Mountain weather and avalanche conditions bulletins (in French)
Henry's Avalanche Talk - popular avalanche training sessions based in French Alps as well as translation of current avalanche conditions
PisteHors.com - Backcountry Skiing and Snowboarding News in English for the French Alps. Excellent coverage of avalanche safety and advice
Stats
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Level 3
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0
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Total Pistes: 75
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Alt. Resort: 2000
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Alt. Summit: 2800
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Alt. Last Snow: 2000
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0
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Alt. High Temp.: 1050
