MegèveSki

Avoiding the crowds on a Sunday in February

It was Chris' last day skiing today and we needed to stop around 3ish so that we could drop him off at Geneva for his flight. Since Sunday tends to be the busiest day and February the busiest month due to French half-term holidays, we were a little concerned that we'd end up stuck in lift queues all day; so we made a plan...

We hit the slopes early. Chris had to buy a lift ticket and he made a school-boy error of picking the shortest queue (one that didn't move for ages whilst the longer queues moved along quickly). We ended up on the second or third cable car up to the top of Rochebrune and immediately dropped down the blue to the Alpette and Raverette lifts. We took the drag as it was quicker. Once at the top of Alpette Miche popped into the restaurant to make a reservation for lunch - in busy periods it's advisable to book if you want to eat at a particular full service restaurant on the mountain. Once that was done we headed down the red path towards Fontaine and found that we were now ahead of the crowd.

We hooned down Fontaine a couple of times,top to bottom, no stops on untracked courderoy. On the second time up the Fontaine lift there were other people on the run, so we hung right and then dropped down towards the Rochefort drag. We passed a couple of people on the way to the drag but there was no queue. From there we cut behind the top of the Lanchettes drag and took the long blue path down towards Cote 2000. We played around in Cote 2000 for a while, until it started to get a little busy and the fact that it was all in the shade had started to get to us and then we began the journey back for lunch.

Down Pre Rossets to Lanchettes, a quick run down the Lanchettes red and then back up the drag and across to Fontaine. By now the crowds had arrived at Fontaine and the run was busy - note that this is busy by Megève standards, it would probably rate as a dead day on the front of La Saulire in Meribel... We hit our first queue of the day at 11.40 at Fontaine. We waited for 10 mins or so. We dropped down the top part of Fountaine to thje Jardin lift, no queues; everyone was either staying on Fontaine or heading towards Cote 2000. Once at the top of Jardin we dropped down to Alpette. I suggested a run or two down to the Alpette chair to take up the 20 mins until our table but I was vetoed by people who had skied enough and wanted to sit down.

After an excellent lunch we skied on the, now empty, Alpette run whilst everyone else had lunch... Finally we had a couple of runs down under the Caboche bubble and headed back to the car.

The pistes were busier than we've seen this season but mostly the people were skiing where we weren't. By heading out early and keeping moving we managed to keep ahead of the crowd and only clashed with them once, in the middle on the way back... I love it when a plan comes together...

Once again I had a great day's skiing in my newly debugged stance. I could immediately feel when my body position was wrong, and knew how to fix it. The week or so of pain, falls and self analysis seems to have been worth it.