2 Alpes Snow Report: 23rd March 2012

This morning was bright and sunny yet again, but a whole lot of fluffy cloud boiled up out of nowhere around midday and started rolling around the ski area and squatting on the top of the hill. I sincerely hope this isn’t going to turn into a replay of the odd weather pattern we had at the end of last season, when every day dawned bright and sunny only for clouds to roll in and flatten the light late in the morning. I can put up with this sort of thing now and then, but it gets annoying when it does it every day and you only get out to board in the afternoons. I wouldn’t have minded if we’d got any snow out of it, but no such luck.

By the time I had retrieved my board from Brun Sports in the town centre, where it had been undergoing further binding ratchet surgery, the cloud had blotted out much of the visibility at the top, but Toura was still sitting in a puddle of sunshine, so I headed over there to take advantage.

After a couple of laps of the chairs another blob of nuage came and sat over the pistes for about half an hour, although it managed to leave the restaurant’s terrace in full sun. Clearly Thierry Dode has managed to establish a direct line to the people in charge of the weather.

An odd side effect of all this peekaboo cloud business was yo-yoing temperature and constantly changing snow conditions. Morning sunshine had evidently hit the pistes and softened up the surface, but it didn’t take more than about 15 minutes of cloud cover to chill everything down and start turning the snow soapy again. Another 15 minutes of sun, on the other hand, saw a return to slushy conditions.

The result of all this was I had pretty much no idea what I was going to find underfoot from one turn to the next, which was bizarre, to say the least, though probably character building or some such similar nonsense.

I’d like to be able to say all this incoming weather is about to bring a load of fresh snow with it, and the sight of a load of alpine choughs playing with the wind over Toura would seem to suggest a change in conditions, but according to all the forecasts we seem to be back to spring sunshine for most of next week, which will mean slush, sunscreen and snoozing in deckchairs when you should be out skiing. Not that I can see anyone complaining too much about any of that, to be honest.

Heading back towards Cretes and more reliable sunshine, the track past the Bellecombe chair was soft and sugary turning to hard and polished in the shade and then to gluey slush further along where it had been in sun for most of the day. An entertaining trip back, culminating in the sight of the aforementioned skiing giraffe outside the White Eggs. And why not.

Despite these rather odd conditions and a forecast for tropical sunshine all week, we’ve still got excellent conditions on the pistes around the glacier and more than enough snow cover to see us out until the end of the season even on the beginner runs at resort level, so those of you out there looking forward with trepidation to Easter holidays can all calm down and stop fretting – your hols are going to be just great. Rember the bikini and the sunglasses.