Quiet pistes and mixed conditions at Le Tour

Le Tour is generally the worst place to go if there is even a breath of wind in the air, so I’m not quite sure what my logic was, probably something along the lines of “in for a penny, in for a pound.” I’m glad I didn’t stay at home drinking tea and faffing though, for my expectations were pleasantly exceeded and I had a lovely few hours zipping around almost empty pistes.

The Liaison Balme track that circles round from Les Autannes to the top of the Vallorcine gondola had a few bare patches toward the start but was, for the most part, well-covered and quite nice. Carrying on down Les Esserts was such good fun that I lapped it a few times; this gently rolling red piste is great when you have it to yourself, swooping along as it twists and turns amongst the trees. It’s tame enough that you don’t have to be an expert skier to enjoy it, but the few steep-ish sections allow you to pick up enough speed to have some fun and keep enough momentum to cruise along the flatter sections.

The wind was blustering a bit on the front side but over the back it was barely noticeable - even the Tete-de-Balme chairlift, AKA “the windiest chairlift in the world” was bearable. The off-piste was a bit of a mixed bag - the bits that had snow blown onto them were lovely, soft and light; the bits that had snow blown off them were hard and heavy, it was a bit like skiing over that crunchy icing that you get on top of Christmas cakes (Delia Smith probably knows the proper name for it, I don’t).

On coming back up the Tete-de-Balme chairlift I headed over to my favourite piste at Le Tour; Les Alpages. It starts with a short steep drop that gives you a bit of speed and then throws you over a series of rollers before spitting you out at the bottom of the Plan des Reines draglift. It’s only short but has a lovely flow to it that feels a bit like being on a rollercoaster. The steep bit at the top was closed though due to poor snow cover, so I cut on to it further down, figuring that everything else had been better than expected so surely this would be too. Nah, the piste signs were telling the truth, the snow cover was indeed “faible”; I picked and skidded my way down between patches of brown earth and blue ice.

I pondered whether to give the Aiguillette a whirl - another steep fun piste when it's in good condition - but even from afar I could see that it had an icy sheen and a few bare patches. Back over to the front side and I did a few laps of the Les Autannes chairlift, trying out the blue and red pistes to either side. Les Ecuries is the longest and steepest but had the worst snow cover, probably due to higher levels of traffic; Arve fared slightly better but of the three the shortest piste, Le Stade, was in by far the best nick and was actually pretty good with a decent coverage of light chalky snow.

The home run, although well-covered, served as a timely reminder that I really need to get my skis edged. It was actually very good fun though if you like hard fast pistes, it was super smooth but surprisingly un-icy and I arrived at the bottom slightly breathless but with a massive grin on my face.

The restless wind that we’ve been experiencing today is the foehn, a bit of a weird weather phenomenon that blasts the valley with gusts of warm dry air that generally eat away at the snow. It’s not all bad news though, as the foehn signals a change in the weather system and is often followed by a big dump of snow! The weather forecast does indeed show a chance of a bit of precipitation tomorrow and looking further ahead there is the possibility of more perhaps mid-week. Sign up for our dump alerts to hear about the snow as soon as it happens.