Chamonix Snow Report: 20th January 2016

Under an hour's drive from Chamonix, we set off at a fairly lazy 9pm thinking that if we arrived a bit later then we'd miss any of the queues at the lift station. As it happens, I doubt there were any judging by how few people there seemed to be on the mountain!

We arrived just in time for the sun to emerge out of the clouds and the first few hours were that glorious combination of blue skies, fresh powder and empty pistes. We had parked in Montjoie and came up the main gondola to Signal 1900; we had a quick scout around to see where looked sunniest and scooted over to the Tierces chairlift up to Aiguille Croche. We were most chuffed to find that the pistes were pretty much still corduroy and we scoped out from the chairlift where we could safely ski off-piste without getting lost or ending up in a stream.

The pistes at Les Contamines seem to be mostly wide and long, with large off-piste sections in between that you can have loads of fun in without having to stray too far. We definitely realised the benefit of checking out the terrain from the chairlift though, as there were a fair few gullies and river beds dotted about that you can't see until you're pretty much in them!

The powder under the Tierces chairlift was light, soft and deep enough to cushion any tumbles. After a couple of runs the sunshine was starting to thicken it up a bit and so we headed over into the less sunny side of the mountain towards Hauteluce.

This was a bit swings and roundabouts - on the one hand the off-piste was a lot lighter and far less tracked, but on the other the pistes were bulletproof and covered in chunks of ice. I think the cloud on this side of the mountain had deterred people as we were skiing pristine pistes that seemed to be almost completely untouched - albeit a bit frozen. We wound our way down to Belleville then took the gondola and chairlift back up to Col de Joly.

One thing that puzzled us all was the grading of the pistes in Les Contamines - they seemed to be completely random. We skied black runs that were full of gentle rollers and easy gradients, followed by blue runs with unexpectedly steep drops and sharp bends. It's a pretty mellow resort though with nothing too gnarly to worry about, so just ignore the colours and enjoy the pistes for what they are!

We stopped at Chez Gaston for lunch and grabbed a cosy table inside - not bad value for a mountain restaurant, with a plat du jour costing about 13€ and a massive omelette with chips and salad costing about 15€. The food was good and the staff were very friendly.

By the time we'd finished lunch we stepped back out again into a whole new world - complete white out! We bumbled our way back down towards the Jonction, where there is a cluster of chairlifts all whizzing people up in different directions. We did a few laps of the pistes, venturing off into the powder whenever we could see where we were going. After a few giddy runs we decided that we'd already had the best that today was going to offer and it was probably time to call it quits before one of us skied blindly into an invisible pylon.

So we took the chairlift back up to Signal and cruised back down the homerun on tired but happy legs, visibility improving vastly once we entered the trees!