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Chamonix Snow Report: 18th February 2015

Skiing around Les Houches & Courmayeur in Italy

featured in Snow report Author Graham Pinkerton, Chamonix Reporter Updated

Bonjour Paris, and England, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Sweden and probably more. Not the start to Eurovision but a roll-call of who's on half term this week...

It's the busiest week of the half term break, the busiest week of the winter on the slopes. You can't escape the number of people in resort, but you can still avoid the worst of the queues.

Head to the lifts early, or have a leisurely breakfast and arrive late ready to ski all day, most folk have headed home long before the lifts close. Go for an early or late lunch and take advantage in the lull whilst everyone else eats. Or try something different!

The official ski touring and snowshoe trails at Les Houches and Grand Montets are part of the marked trail network, but once in the trees you feel miles away from the pistes and crowds. And if the lift queues are REALLY bad at the start of the day, you might even be quicker on the way up.

At Les Houches on Monday the skin trail is getting a little thin in places lower down but still fine for on your way up with skins on. Once up the hill the queues for the lifts weren't as bad as I was expecting and the warm temperatures had nicely softened off the pistes with only a few firmer scraped sections near the snow cannons waiting to catch out the unwary.

If you've got the MBU pass, another option is to get on the bus and head to Courmayeur in Italy. The resort is still busier than usual with the holiday crowds, but not as markedly so as Chamonix. What's more, whilst Chamonix was mostly dry over the weekend, Courmayeur was getting snowed on. 

Exiting the Mont Blanc tunnel on Tuesday morning we were greeted by blue skies and fresh snow on the trees. The stories that no one rides off piste in Italy might no longer be true, but we were still able to ride powder all day with long pitches of untracked snow between the more skied sections. The queues were never more than a minute long, with the exception of the Youla lift, Courmayeur's version of the Grand Montets top lift, but even here it was only about a 30 minute wait. All this AND topped off with some fine Italian coffee.

The forecast for the rest of the week looks mostly warm and sunny, perfect weather for cruising about the pistes, taking in the views and helping to stabilise the snowpack in advance of the next weather system hopefully coming in from the northwest this weekend.

Location

Map of the surrounding area