MegèveSki

And I thought Avoriaz was ugly

We drove to Flaine today as it's a fair bit higher than we are and so we figured that the snow was likely to be better than we had around here. We were right, the snow was pretty good up top but boy is Flaine ugly.

The drive took around an hour and twenty minutes and took us up some of the most mountainy mountain roads we've been on; lots of really tight hair pin bends and steep inclines. We drove past the lower, linked, resort of Les Carroz and saw some reasonable looking snow on the pistes that we could see from the road, which was a good start.

We parked at P1, exchanged one of our Megève season pass special tickets for a free lift ticket and headed up the Aup de Veran bubble. Flaine is linked to Les Carroz, Morillon and Samoens, all of which are lower than Flaine itself, and forms the Grand Massif ski area of 256km of pistes. We decided to concentrate on the Flaine bowl as this was the highest and therefore should have the best snow. The snow was definitely much more wintery than the spring snow we have here but it had also been subject to some freeze/thaw and so was a bit chunky and scrapy first thing. We skied down the Lapiaz red to the Lapiaz lift and were surprised at how quiet the run was; that was until we got near the bottom and found the brown patches, rocks and bumps.

The Flaine bowl has plenty of off-piste oportunities but the guide books that we'd read warned us that due to the structure of the mountains there were lots of rock crevases and holes and that the off-piste in the bowl should be treated as if it were a glacier and only ventured into with a guide... We cut down from the Lapiaz lift to the Diamant Noir lift and headed up to the top of Flaine at 2480m. Unfortunately the top half of the Diamant Noir black was closed so we skied down the red Faust and then took Emeraude to the Perdrix lift.

Later we skied the Lucifer red down from Perdrix and this turned out to be an ungroomed piste which became a bump run about a third of the way down. The top section was a nice gentle slope with reasonably sane bumps and nice snow, the lower section was steeper, the snow was less good and the bumps were more "interesting".

Miche had some problems on the steeper section and we decided to stop for a rest and our sandwiches near to the restaurant at the bottom of the Col de Plate lift. After lunch we skied down to the base again to work out where to go but the snow lower down had become soupy slush by that time and was very heavy going. This aggrevated Miche's tired knees and so we decided to call it a day. Just as we stopped skiing the rain arrived so it seemed like we picked a good time to stop.

Ugly as it is I expect we'll visit Flaine again if the snow doesn't improve closer to home.

You can almost imagine staging a desperate mission to destroy the accomodation block that is cunningly suspended over one of the car parks; some plastic explosives in just the right place and...

Parts of Flaine look like crap UK council buildings from the 60's and 70's...

And for this one, we'll use the dark coloured stuff...

Amusing little lift thing to take people from MDAU121* to the car park.

The whole thing as viewed from the Aup de Veran bubble...

*MDAU = Mindlessly Dull Accomodation Unit