Chamonix Snow Report: 1st April 2007
Friday saw a little fresh snow fall overnight in Chamonix. It started as rain but quickly turned to snow and was falling fairly heavily at times. However, the ground is quite warm down here now and by morning there were only 2–3cm and then that was gone by the afternoon. Still, it was good to see it snow again and it gave the ski areas a little top-up ready for the Easter holidays.
Up at Grands Montets yesterday the dusting in town translated into something a little more satisfying but it fell well short of being enough to qualify the day as a powdery one. It's hard to grumble about some fresh snow but I'm going to do it anyway. The problem was that the snow was light enough to be good powder but the 10–15cm that had fallen wasn't quite enough to bury the hard lumps of refrozen snow below. This made it tricky to ride as it was neither powder nor hard-pack but a little of both. I spent the first couple of runs snowboarding like an idiot, trying to deal with the awkward conditions off piste. Things did improve as the day went on and the temperature rose to fairly warm levels: the crust below softened and made it easier to hold an edge when your snowboard brushed away the loose fresh snow on top. So by early afternoon the off piste was actually pretty good fun to ride so long as you attacked it and weren't afraid to plough through the rough stuff.
The park was closed yesterday for a competition, so we made a fairly extensive examination of the off piste at Grands Montets except for the top cable-car: by the time we arrived at the lift station at 10:30 all the reservations were taken and the queue never seemed to be much shorter than an hour long all day. The snow looked good on the Face of the Grands Montets just going by the tracks of the skiers and snowboarders who had been down it. Although I suspect that the powder wasn't as deep as it looked: one guy I talked too said that some of the snow in Combe de la Pendant was as good as that on the Face. We had found some fairly good snow in the Combe de la Pendant ourselves; it was better where it was a little windloaded, and also on the shadier slopes to the skier's left of the bowl. By the afternoon, to the skier's right of Pendant, the sun had started to turn the fresh snow heavy.
Off of the Herse lift we found some reasonably light snow to the skier's right heading close to the cliffs and into the Italian bowl. It was fairly chopped up, with the moguls lightly covered, but it wasn't that bad at all, and you just had to pick your turns carefully to avoid the scraped-bare patches of ice. We followed the Hotel Variant route down to Pierre a Ric. The Variant is actually closed right now but I have to say that apart from the big moguls it really wasn't that bad and a good challenge if you like mixing things up with bumps, trees, ice and some tight little powdery turns here and there. The Pierre a Ric is still holding out well and looks set to still be open and in reasonable condition for Easter, although the snow is getting very sticky at the bottom of the run.
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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High Temp.: 16
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Alt. High Temp.: 1050
