2 Alpes Snow Report: 2nd April 2012

Possible change in the weather in the offing this week, with the vague promise of something like snow, which will be good news as long as it doesn’t rain too much all over the lower slopes.

With the zero isotherm predicted to lurk somewhere around the 2000m mark we’re going to have to accept the inevitability of rain on the beginner slopes at the Bas des Pistes, but fingers crossed we’ll get snow at Cretes level, so that even if the bottom runs get decimated there’s still something for beginners a bit higher up.

Rumours of a big end of season dump seem to have been greatly exaggerated, but snow-forecast.com is predicting a small daily ration for the rest of the week, so with any luck we should end up with 20 to 30 centimetres, which will freshen up the pistes a bit for the upcoming Easter holiday.

Conditions over the weekend haven’t changed much (warm and sunny, wintry snow at the top, ice and slush lower down etc etc) except that by Sunday afternoon the thaw had crept up as far as the bottom of the Signal, which was getting slushy on the run in to the chair.

Further up at the top of the Signal and on the glacier the snow remains in a good state and untouched by the thaw, though as a result it is getting increasingly hard packed after several weeks without fresh snowfall, so a bit of extra this week should make things a bit more forgiving underfoot.

Skiing friends have been moaning about slush and sore knees this week, but from a boarder’s point of view the soft conditions have been lots of fun. Drying out trousers and gloves at the end of the day is less fun, admittedly, and spending the entirety of every afternoon with a soaking wet bum probably isn’t up there with winning the lottery either, but the answer to that is probably to get more practice at remaining more or less upright most of the time.

Best bits for slush-surfing this week have been all the south-facing sections of the Glaciers and Jandri runs, the beginner section running down to the Bellecombes chair and the Thuit, which has been lots of fun all week, not least because nobody seems to be bothering with it at the moment. This might have something to do with the fact that the Thuit/Cretes chair has been closed for repairs for the past four days, which means that once at the bottom your only option is the slow chair back up to 2400m and the Diable telecabin. By the time you’ve done this twice you’ll find it begins to sap your will to live, so a third run down starts to look like a lot of sitting on chairs for not a lot of boarding.

The moany skiers amongst you should think about getting out of bed a bit earlier and making it up the hill in the morning, when conditions are firmer, or possibly even icy. Failing that, the runs over 3200m as well as anything further down and north facing remain relatively thaw-free and a bit more ski friendly.

The runs back to resort are becoming increasingly sketchy, and while Diable1 is technically still open it’s just about advisable to take a pair of walking boots with you in a backpack. You can still get down it if you stay over to the right where the snowguns are, but I don’t rate its chances of surviving rainfall this week. The Valentin, other the other hand, remains in a reasonably good state, so if we’re lucky we should still be skiing back to resort at the end of the season.