Welcome to pow-town otherwise known as La Plagne

Sorry to gloat but really I am just so excited by the sheer levels of snow out there, there I is a snow base of 285cm at glacier level, 165cm at 2000m and even down at the lowest of the low villages, 1250m we have a 40cm snow base. I truly think this is the deepest we’ve had the snow all season and it’s easy to see that without even getting on a chairlift because as you walk around town, you’ll notice that steps you used to walk down have disappeared, hills you used to climb up are now level roads and bar and restaurant terraces that you used to step up onto now have steps dug into the snow so that you can climb down onto them.

Once out and about on the mountain you’ll see more changes, in the shape of the runs and the gradients of the slopes, now that the snow base is thicker the runs can cruise over the top of obstacles they previously had to weave around. For example on Levasset where you’ll see the giant boulder that splits the piste just before the rope tow simply isn’t there anymore, no it didn’t roll away, you’re now just skiing over its head.

Alas this mountainous amount of fresh snow hasn’t come without its downside, winter also returned in the form of high winds which kept the Glacier closed for much of the last fortnight and then seriously high winds which had chairlifts swaying wildly and kept large areas of the mountain closed or forced them to close early over the weekend and the last two days.

Hopefully those wild windy days are done for the week now though as the weather forecast is predicting a complete 180 in the weather bringing us clear skies and sunshine for the next 4 days. Wednesday through Saturday is looking like beautiful blue sky warm days enabling us to make the most of the beautiful new snow with perfect visibility and the chance of working on our goggle tans. What more could you ask for?

Well I will ask you for one more thing but it’s for your own good; the other down side of this vast amount of snow is that the avalanche risk just went up considerably. A metre and half of fresh snow just fell on warm wet ground and the risk of slides is high and will get higher as the sun comes out over the next few days. The avalanche risk is at 4/5 today but will probably climb to 5/5 once the sun starts hitting the slopes. Do us all a favour and stay on-piste. We had a few avalanches around resort last week including one large one that we thought had buried a skier, luckily it hadn’t, but it woke us all to the dangers.

If you don’t know what you’re doing off piste then don’t do it and if runs are closed around resort, respect that and stay off them, the lifties aren’t hoarding powder runs for their own evil ends, they’re roping off runs that have avalanche risks above or beside them. Respect the mountain and stay safe.

That being said get out there and enjoy the hell out of the pistes. Grab a hot bath and a mug of hot chocolate to defrost from the last few blustery downright chilly days and prepare for four days of sunshine, fresh snow and beautiful on piste skiing all the way down to the lowest villages.