Chamonix Snow Report: 3rd March 2015
Conditions on Brevent Ski area
Mountain weather is a fickle beast and every so often the blue sky powder days need to be paid for by a resort shutting storm. Frustrating. More so if it's your only week's skiing of the year, but a quick look through a newspaper should soon remind you that things could be worse, you're not living in a war zone or working in a cobalt mine, so you might as well sit in a nice warm pub and have some food with your friends.
With the weather still pretty windy on Tuesday morning, too windy to ski anything too exciting anyway, we headed up Brevent for a look about at what the weather had done to the snow at various altitudes. Surprisingly, things were pretty good. At about 1800m, or the lowest point of the Brevent ski area, about 10cm of fresh snow was sitting on top of the existing base. Not a huge amount for getting powder turns but perfect for freshening up the pistes which had been nicely groomed and were giving fast, fun skiing.
The only rutted icy patches we were able to find were on the BMW slalom piste, not much you can do about that really. As ever there were folk asking if the signs stating the home run was closed due to lack of snow were correct. They are, there are large sections with no snow at all lower down, and large wet slides have crossed the piste at several points. A reminder if ever you need one that when pisteurs say a run is closed due to avalanche danger, they might just mean it!
With both the top gondola and the Col Cornu chair closed the terrain available was pretty limited, which is probably why the pistes were fairly quiet. That and a fair number of skiers and snowboarders were waiting by the netting for the Col Cornu chair top open. Somewhat surprisingly, a little after midday it did!
As you'd expect from Chamonix, traces started appearing over the mountain quickly, however it was nothing like you get on the morning of a powder day, so everyone had a bit more time to get their turns in. The snow had been warmed a little by the sun, and you had to search out the more easterly aspects to get lighter snow, but with the lack of other tracks even the heavier snow facing south was giving nice smooth skiing.
Looking higher up the hill it was clear to see the wind still transporting snow onto east facing slopes, and there was plenty of evidence of slides on most aspects, some with pretty big debris piles. Stay safe if heading off piste.
For the rest of the week, the weather is particularly tricky to predict just now. The most likely outcome seems to be that there will be less snow falling, more sun shining, and colder temperatures with each day until Saturday, when it might get warmer again. But then, the weather doesn't read the weather forecast, so it will do what it feels like anyway.
