A person on a snowboard is doing a trick in the air

A snowy mountain with a ski lift in the foreground and skiers on the slope in the background

Chamonix Snow Report: 1st March 2005

featured in Snow report Author Ellie Mahoney, Chamonix Editor Updated 26 May 2016

Yesterday afternoon we stuck to the pistes at Brevent and Flegere, which didn't seem too busy until the end of the day when there was a 15-minute queue to take the gondola back down to Chamonix (I've been avoiding the run Nants back to town as it was pretty stony last time I tried it). Col Cornu chair had a moderate wait of about 10 minutes, as did the Index chair, which also kept stopping for no apparent reason. At Flegere the black run Floria is in great shape at the moment – well groomed, very fast and mostly deserted. Nearer the bottom of Floria to the right there are some natural half pipes, good fun for trying a bit of freestyle. All around Flegere there's great terrain for tricks; in particular the cat track that zig zags below the Index lift is great for spinning off, although the snow is little hard and moguled in places at the moment. I managed to knee myself in the eye when I messed up a landing. The pistes at Brevent are in similar condition – hard and a little icy with the off piste similar, except moguled too. Snow coverage is excellent with there being few if any bare patches.

Today we had unbroken sunshine. It was cold too though: -11ºc at our house at 9am this morning and still 0ºc this afternoon at 5pm. This is great for the snow as it's staying in good condition without much thawing and refreezing. The sunshine tempted us to go to Le Tour to build a kicker; there's nothing like sessioning a jump on a sunny day with a bunch of friends. We chose an out of the way spot just off of L'Aiguillette drag lift with a good, fairly steep powdery landing to absorb our impacts – there's still a little soft snow around if you hunt it down! The pistes at Le Tour today (or at least the ones to and from the back, which is where we mainly stayed – including Esserts, Bechat-Esserts) were very hard packed but not really icy (with the exception of the Caisets run down to Le Tour, where I hit one ice patch near a snow cannon), and made for good carving if you've got edges sharp enough. Amazingly, nor were they very busy and we pretty much walked straight on to the Autannes and Tete de Balme chairs each time. It was very cold on the Tete de Balme chair though, with a bitter wind picking up just as you emerge from the top of the woods. This chair has to be one of the windiest and coldest in the valley and perhaps this accounted for the lack of traffic today.

Useful Links
Cross-country skiing is Open
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

We will be keeping this Chamonix snow report updated often during the season, but if you want even more up-to-date news on the ski conditions, why not sign up for our Dump Alert? We'll email you each time it snows enough to significantly change the skiing conditions. It's great to know that the snow is falling in the run-up to your holiday, and it might even allow you to book a last-minute weekend when the snow is particularly good. The service is free, and you can unsubscribe whenever you like.

Additional snow and weather information provided, with thanks, by meteo.chamonix.com and the Tourist Office