2 Alpes Telecabin Retirement Review

But the resort saw its faithful eggs out in style, with free rides on the last two days of the season and a party at the Dable au Coeur restaurant at the top on Saturday. Bizarrely, no-one seems to know exctly how old the Diable telecabin actually was – the oldest picture I’ve found online dates from 1959, but nobody at the lift company or anywhere else semed to have any idea when the thing was installed. Answers on a postcard please.

Meanwhile, work on the new six-man chair continues apace, with the cable now sitting there on its giant bobbin ready to go, and the lift station itself almost finished. No sign of the rumoured spangly new ticket sales point though, much to my disappointment, but no doubt there’s time to cobble that together before the winter.

This should all make for a much more comfortable and convenient experience for the skiing punter, with ticket-purchasing facilities right next to the lift and no need for all that wandering about and getting slightly lost while carting a load of ski gear and three small children. All terribly modern and newfangled.

Another pressing question (and again one to which there seems to be no answer) is what are they going to do with the old eggs? Can we buy one for use as an unusual garden gazebo or will they be flogged off as a job lot to some fledgling eastern european ski resort? It could be worth a week’s skiing in Azerbaijan just for the nostalgia value of revisiting an egg.

Not only has summer definitvely finished, but winter seems to have elbowed autumn rudely out of the way and got its foot in the door early. Temperatures plummeted from 42°C to 3°C in the space of days and there was a good dusting of snow as low down as 1850m on Friday night and Saturday morning. Most of this has since melted, as you’d expect, but it should have left a good covering on the glacier, which bodes well for early opening over the half term week at the end of October.

Fortunately though, temperatures have bounced back up again to a more reasonable autumnal 20ish, and the promise of sun over the next week or so means there is still plenty of walking, via ferrata and road biking to be had for as long as the weather holds out. Though if you’re planning to cycle up cols, I can tell you from personal experience that you should really take a woolly jumper and some tights.

Campsites and other accommodations will be open well into September and in some cases even October, so if you fancy an idyllic break in the mountains (and why would you not) you’ll find plenty of places to choose from. What you won’t find is crowds of people clogging up the paths and frightening off the marmots, which makes autumn arguably the best time to go walking, particularly with all the foliage about to turn orange and red. It’s not quite fall in New England, but it’s not bad all the same.