Chamonix Snow Report: 30th March 2010

Yesterday was amazing. It started off fairly cloudy but cleared up as the morning went on, becoming a very warm blue sky powder day with miles and miles of fresh for everyone to ride! Most of us were dressing for the previous days when it had been snowing and cold, so as the day went on we quickly found it necessary to remove extra layers and even thermals getting down to just a t-shirt underneath our jackets! It's great to be riding easily accessible powder just off the piste, after having almost a month of searching far and wide getting our thinking caps on to really figure out where the wind might blow snow or sheltered gullies might hide some still fresh pow! We made it though, pretty much every day during the month of no snow we still got powder or almost sort of powder!

We have been riding a lot at the Grand Montets just because of its sheer altitude and the amount of mountain there is available to ride with many different options available. You can choose from Glacier riding to some easily accessible tours back to Chamonix, or up on some of the high mountain tours from the Argentiere glacier there is some tree riding, lots of long open pistes, and the longest home run available, not to mention a fairly decent park even if it does lack a half pipe!

The top lift has been closed for 3 days and the booking system had filled up very quickly. With a large (almost 2 hour!) queue, we decided to just have fun and hit what was available, trying to ignore the guys scoring some amazing lines down from the top lift! We had a good few runs down the L'avancher bowl and the sheer size of this bowl means you can pretty much score some fresh all day on a powder day such as this! With many features, wind lips and rocks to drop off in to soft snow it was time to get trying out some tricks on natural hits. After having a few good runs at this and several near misses from falls, we headed for some mellow runs through the Dream Forest, where if you headed far skiers left you could still score a load of fresh!

Although the Easter holidays have started, it's actually been fairly tranquil so the whole day we where able to get fresh even without getting the top lift in! We stayed up till the last possible lift heading back down the home run around 5pm where we were met by thousands of moguls! However, they were really soft and forgiving so it was a good time to practice riding straight down as fast as we could over the top of them, and for the snowboarders amongst us, it was a good opportunity to give it a go switch! We all had an amazing day, pretty knackered we headed down for a quick bit of Après ski at the Office bar in Argentiere!

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!