2 Alpes Snow Report: 24th January 2012

It was already windy at the top of the Diable when I got up there in the middle of the morning, and it blew me to a standstill half way along the flat towards the Cretes, which was a tad annoying. Bearing this in mind, I probably shouldn’t have bothered going up to the top, but in a fit of misplaced optimism I did it anyway.

Predictably, it was cold and nasty, and the pistes off the top of the chair had been scraped clean of loose snow, so I zipped across to Jandri4 and headed off to Toura to ski it in the sunshine for a change. The bottom of Toura and the snowpark are both little suntraps, so on a morning when you’ve frozen your whatsits off on the glacier it’s a good plan to get down there for lunch on the terrace – decent pizzas, vast omelettes and piles of chips, all at resonable prices. And if you can’t be bothered with the full lunch service thing there’s always the snack bar and its deckchairs next door.

All three runs off the top of the chairs were in excellent condition. The short section leading down towards the junction was a bit windblown but nothing to whinge about, and only slightly further down the snow was reliably soft and fluffy. Lac Noir in the middle seems to be getting forgotten about this season, and I lapped it several times without seeing another rider. You can have a lot of fun rolling up and down the sides of this run, which has something of a natural half-pipe effect, before popping out back on the main drag at the bottom. Watch yourself at the junction though, particularly if you’re a goofy boarder – you’ve got people coming in from Lac Noir2 on your right, then more of them further along heading down the main Jandri4 back to the chairs.

I spent a bit of time lapping the Toura chair and watching the slopestyle competitors in the European Snowboard Cup, but failing to get any impressive pictures of airborne nutters. Possibly because I was toting a Sony point ‘n’ shoot and not the several thousand squids worth of pro DSLR with long lens and tripod which I saw someone else carting about. Just as well really, as I’m sure I’d just fall over and land on it all.

After an hour or so of this I met up with Zelpah, on her way up after a morning’s thumb-twiddling behind a reception desk, and we were just heading off to investigate the Bellecombe runs when JC called to offer us chips at the Toura snack bar. Rude to refuse, we thought, so we backtracked and went off to see what he and Marie had to say about the off piste, which is what they’d been doing all morning.

Awesome, was the verdict, though a bit heavy and slightly crusted in places. They had lapped the Vallons du Diable twice, coming out back at the bottom of the Diable telecabin, then done the bottom part of the Echines next to Signal2 several times. JC was keen to do the Rachas, which looks fairly untracked, but after their chipstop they decided to head off to La Fee instead, and have a look at some of the gullies down that way. It seems that last weekend’s dump has survived the wind a lot better than previous snowfall, and though lots of the snow near the pistes has been heavily tracked, there’s still plenty of accessible virgin stuff to do. Anyone interested in off piste around 2Alpes could do worse than invest in the Vamos guide – detailed descriptions in both French and English of the routes in and around resort as well as at La Grave and around Alpe d’Huez. If you want to make the most of it though, you should go and talk to the Bureau des Guides, who will be able to snout out the best routes based on recent snowfall and subsequent weather conditions. No point in wasting your valuable holiday time for want of local knowledge.

The powder fiends left us mere piste cruisers tootling down to La Fee by the conventional route, where the snow was once again probably some of the best in resort. We headed back up the Fee chair rather than taking the track down to the Thuit/Cretes chair, aiming once more to have a look at the Bellecombe. By this time though, it was getting on for 4pm and Zelpah was due back for the evening’s thumb-twiddling activities, so we took off towards Cretes via Thuit1, where conditions were again some of the best we’d seen all day.

Back at 2100 I picked up JC, who had managed to return in one piece, so we did a few runs down Cretes before the chair closed and then egged it back down to resort in the Diable.

Today is once again offering us excessive wind from the north, so if I were you I wouldn’t bother with the glacier. Stick, instead, to sheltered spots like the Fee, Thuit and Bellecombe or head for Vallee Blanche and Mont de Lans on the other side of resort – tree-lined skiing down to the village at Mont de Lans, great views across resort from the Vallee Blanche side, and the possibility of moules frites and a beer in the Kanata at the top of the Telesiege La Cote for lunch. All a lot better than being blast-chilled at the top.