A person skiing down a snow covered slope with a ski lift in the background

Skiers and snowboarders on a snowy slope with mountains in the background

An aerial view of a person skiing down a snow covered slope

Chamonix Snow Report: 24th January 2006

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

No new snow to report, but the high winds of the past few days have subsided, which meant that today the top cable car at Grands Montets could open. The thought of all that untracked snow was obviously in the forefront of the minds of those in the long queue for the lift. I reckoned it was about a 45-minute wait this morning, so I left it until the afternoon before heading up; I waited then for only about 10 minutes at the most. By the time I got up there any untracked snow had gone, and anyway I wonder how much there really would have been that wasn't affected by the high winds at altitude. Instead, what I found on the Pylones piste was a mixture of soft, choppy snow and icy sections here and there. The worst icy sections were first at the top of the run as it crosses down onto the glacier – an orange plastic fence funnels you down to the right – and second just where the Pylones run meets Combes at the top of the Herse lift. In between, the snow was good: bumpy but soft and not at all crusty. The upper section of Pylones, before it crosses back to the front of Grands Montets, had a short but nasty section of glacial ice on it; it was pretty obvious but I wasn't ready for how icy it was: there wasn't a chance of my blunt edges even tickling it, so over I went. Point de Vue is closed at the moment, or at least unmarked, which didn't deter many skiers who followed its usual route down. In general the glacier seemed to have less snow on than is normal for this time of year, with crevasses aplenty lurking ready to swallow the unwary. Earlier, I had looked down the Poubelle couloir by the top of the Bochard and noticed a few tracks on the Pas de Chevre; the snow looked good. Later though I saw some skiers and snowboarders heading out from the top of Grands Montets in the direction of the Pas de Chevre, but the snow looked very windblown, hard and crusty: they were sliding over it without leaving the slightest mark.

Aside from the top cable car, things at Grands Montets haven't changed that much of late with the exception of a boarder-cross park having been built. It's located skier's left of the Marmottons piste and has a few tabletops, rollers and banked turns. I'm not sure if it's been built in preparation for anything specific but it seems to be open and anyone can have a go through it. As with most of the runs at the moment the snow is very hard and almost icy, so take is easy on the jumps as falling on that stuff is going to hurt.

Bochard is hard packed with some loose snow on top to help get some grip. Combes is similarly hard packed, smooth and a test of your skis' sharpness; thankfully all of the moguls have gone. Some of the off piste is still reasonably good: it's tracked but still soft enough to get a decent turn on; there are even a few patches of untracked snow for one or two fresh turns. Elsewhere off piste seems to have developed moguls with large areas of the Grands Montets resembling the surface of a golf ball. Pierre a Ric is much the same as it has been over the last week: hard, fast and very tricky to hold an edge on especially if you pick one of the icier patches to turn on. There was some soft snow at the edges, which I used when I was feeling lazy with my turns.

Useful Information
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.

Useful Links
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

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