Chamonix Snow Report: 28th February 2010

This week has pretty much been powder days all week I think every single day this week I have managed to get my hands on some fresh, making the best of the conditions, wind direction and avoiding lift closures after heavy and unstable dumps of snow. There has been a lot of a wind earlier on in the week which created a lot of wind slab, so add another large quantity of snow on top of that so it will be fairly easy to start an avalanche standing on top of one of these unstable areas. The pisteurs are really good at making the ski area safe and will not open the mountain until unstable slopes have been blasted to trigger the inevitable avalanches, making riding within the ski areas safe. So now isn't the time for big hikes away from the well patrolled and maintained areas and with all this snow around just to the sides of the pistes why would you need to stray to far anyway?

On big powder days a lot of people will head straight for the Grand Montets, being the biggest hill to ride in the area and most options for off piste riding. However as it is one of the biggest hills it's one of the hardest to maintain and it can take a long time before the mountain is made safe which will cause large queues and long waits to get up the hill. The other day when this was happening and I could hear the bombs going off, I decided to go against the mass of people and head down to Les Houches. Being a smaller hill and at the other end of the valley, it's easier to maintain and isn't prone to the same effect of wind unlike Grand Montets. On bad weather days, it's often the best spot to hit with loads of tree runs, some great little restaurants and you might even find yourself below the cloud and with some outstanding views of the valley. We headed down fairly early while everyone was queueing up for the lifts to open in Grand Montets and found ourselves getting straight on the lift. No queue and in to some empty untracked fields of powder! We did a few laps of the world famous Kandahar run which is used in the world cup skiing circuit and is a brilliant tree run with lots of off piste routes to the sides and loads of nice features in the terrain to jib around on. There is also a very nicely shaped new park in the area which wasn't open due to the amount of snow but looks like good fun with large jumps and fancy boxes to grind, and all sponsored by DC. After a few runs of the Kandahar, we picked out loads of tree runs with fresh powder everywhere and had an amazing morning. Meanwhile Grand Montets was still not open and most had given up on queueing any longer. So we stopped for lunch in a lovely restaurant at the top of the Parion bubble lift, followed by a few more untracked runs to finish the day off.

Check out what to do around town once the lifts have closed with our Apres Ski Report - a weekly round up of what's hot and where to party in Chamonix!