A person skiing down a snowy slope with their shadow on the snow

A snowy mountain with a blue sky in the background

A person is riding a snowboard down a snow covered slope

A person skiing down a snowy slope with trees in the background

A person skiing down a snowy slope with a house in the background

Chamonix Snow Report: 2nd April 2008

featured in Snow report Author Jim Brady, Updated 24 October 2014

Chamonix has a strange morning after the big party feel to it at the moment. It's very quiet in town and also quiet on the mountain. All the talk among the season workers is what you are doing for the summer. However and it's a big however the conditions high up on the hill are still great. It snowed on Monday, about 15cm and it has snowed again today another 5cm and its still raining in town tonight.

Tuesday was a fine day and we headed up to Grands Montets, plenty of room to park and no queue at all for the lift. There was a large queue however for the top cable car and all the reservations for the day were gone by 10am, we did take the opportunity to book a bin for Wednesday.

The pistes at Grands Montets are all in good condition with soft new snow over a firm base, it does get scraped off quite quickly but the base is not so hard and icy that it is unpleasant to ski. The off piste is well tracked but still soft and the moguls are a reasonable size and not hard.

We headed to Grands Montets again on Wednesday, and made straight for the top. As it turned out the reservation was totally unnecessary as there was no queue at all for the top cable car, the cabin was not even full when it started off into the cloud. At the top the reason was obvious; there were very high winds and near white out conditions. We stayed on the piste skiing and riding the black Point de Vue. The snow was great, a light layer, on top of a soft base, soft enough for me to push my ski pole in three feet. Despite the good snow the poor visibility made it a hard decent and only pleasant in a few short sections.

After a quick hot chocolate we tried our luck in the Dream Forest, the visibility was OK here but the snow was hard work, there was 10-15cm of fresh but Monday's snow underneath, I guess due to the lower altitude here, had thawed and refrozen. The best skiing and riding of the day was on piste, where the falling snow had settled up to 15cm thick. The home run was also good, although the falling snow turned to rain towards the bottom. It's still flat, and the slightly slushy snow at the bottom skis a bit like powder.

The avalanche level has dropped to 2, moderate. The forecast is for another cloudy day tomorrow, but with no rain/snow. Friday looks set to be fine with fresh disturbances from the north due over the weekend.

So while the big party may be drawing to a close, it seems some of the revellers have left behind a few nice bottles which the stragglers are going to be enjoying for a few weeks yet.

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