MegèveSki

Weatherman speak with forked tongue

We drove to Praz sur Arly today. It's only 10 mins away from where we are and it's probably quicker to get to the Praz car park than it is to get to the Jaillet car park... The 30-40cms of snow that was forecast didn't show, but the bitter wind did. A short day due to a late start, cold winds, no visibility, an unknown resort where it was too cold and windy to get the map out and our inability to locate a decent restaurant for lunch.

Praz seems quite nice. We didn't ski much of it and the bits we did ski were suffering from the same rain->freeze->ice problem as the slopes of Megève though the extra snow we got last night had helped a little. The new ice has made us realise that it's been a while since we've had our edges sharpened; I'll look into that later. Praz itself is covered by our Evasion Mont Blanc ski pass, so skiing there today was free. The slopes of Praz are linked to Flumet and Notre Damme de Bellecombe both of which are over the 'border' in the Savoie region whilst Praz is in the Haute Savoie region; because of this border crossing you have to buy a seperate ticket if you want to use the Savoie lifts.

By the time we'd worked out where we wanted to go the clouds and wind had arrived and we decided that we no longer wanted to go somewhere that was exposed and unknown. Skiing a white-out on known runs is one thing, skiing it on new teritory on an exposed ridge is another. We went looking for a restaurant for lunch but due to the weather I didn't fancy pulling out the map. We did one pass, failed to get to one restaurant and decided that we didn't want to sit outside when we finally found another... At that point the cold and hunger won out and we drove back to Megève for a pizza...

I expect we'll ski at Praz again later in the week. It's certainly a worthwhile area and it's close enough to be mistaken for part of the main Megève area.