MegèveSki

Sunshine and "death cookies" in La Clusaz

This morning we drove 40 minutes to La Clusaz via Praz sur Arly, Flumet, La Giettaz and the Col des Aravis pass. The drive was along one of those narrow, winding, mountain roads that probably aren't that much fun in winter, but it's April so it was quite pleasant. La Clusaz has several ski areas, some are linked and of the ones that still had good snow we'd been recommended the La Balme area as having some good runs. The first problem was finding where to park and which lifts to take; the signs in La Clusaz were awful and we drove around quite a bit and ended up navigating by the lifts that we could see, hoping that we could find a road that led that way...

We parked near to the Cret du Merle chair lift and exchanged the last of the free lift ticket vouchers that we had got with our season pass. We took the chair up and then took the Cret du Loup chair and then the L'Aiguille chair to 2380m. The vast off-piste area under the chair looked like it would be good in good weather but today looked like waves of lightly frozen crud. The snow coverage was good but the snow was a bit hard and lumpy with patches of hard pack mixed in with more chopped up sections; pretty standard freeze/thaw grooming with a large amount of small hard lumps scattered all over the piste. The L'Aiguille red run looked good, if a little busier than we are now used to, and was the only piste down, so we took it. We then took the long Fernuy red down towards the Balme base area.

The two crusty reds weren't the nicest way to start the day but that's one of the problems with skiing a new area at this time of year; it's hard to know where has good coverage and good conditions and isn't too busy... I spent these first runs working on my hands. Yesterday's video shows that I need to... The "visible hands" and "push down through the down hill hand" drills seemed to work well for me this morning. The later helping me to stay nice and secure even on the smoothest of the hard pack. Miche found it hard to get going on these runs and the poor start was to stay with her for the rest of the day.

Once over at the La Balme base we took the Balme bubble up and had a coffee break at the restaurant there; I needed a sugar fix. Then we took the Col de Balme chair up to 2470m and the other side of the ridge that can be seen from Megève and Le Torraz. The views from here were amazing, looking across La Giettaz to Megève and on to Mont Blanc.

From Col de Balme we skied down the Blanchot red which was in a similar condition to the earlier reds we'd skied. The area around the Col de Balme chair is a huge open bowl of off-piste goodness. The whole area was pretty much tracked out and the conditions looked crusty and crunchy but there were still a few die hards in there blasting their way through. There seemed to be a lot of helmet wearing, twin tipped, gnarly dudes around the La Balme area today, lots had season passes displayed and some even used their twin tips to ski backwards... Given the kind of off-piste here it's hardly surprising that it attracts this kind of crowd.

Miche still hadn't really got comfortable with the conditions when we got back to the restaurant but I talked her in to trying the run again; once more with feeling... We worked on powering the skis through the snow and skiing the slope rather than letting it ski you, she skied it better but it's hard to know if it was my advice or the sun that made the difference and either way she still wasn't happy and her knees were hurting from the abuse that comes from not being comfortable and skiing steep rubble. It was around 2.30 and the lower slopes were starting to suffer from the sun so we decided to head home.

We skied the La Balme blue down to the base and whilst the snow was OK for the first section it got very soft and sticky lower down and there were several large patches of mud. We took the Fernuy bubble back up to the L'Aiguille area and skied down past the Cred du Loup chair and down Le Loup and Merle to the bottom. The snow on the lower slopes ranged from reasonably fast spring slush to sticky sludge and there were lots of brown patches and rocks. We managed to ski back to the road near where we parked with only one detour via a road that looked surprisingly similar but didn't have our car parked in it.

My exercises were working reasonably well today and I felt like I skied with much better hand position for much of the day; no video today so who knows if it was actually any better... I had intended to video Miche today but it wasn't the day for it. The La Clusaz ski area seems pretty big and reasonably well connected, the reds that we skiied seemed generally steeper than in Megève and there are several long blacks. There's masses of off-piste though most of it seems to be above the tree line; I don't expect it's too much fun to ski in white out conditions but on a day like today it would be good. Next time we come we'll try and spot the signs for the Balme base area and park up there as it would make skiing that side much easier.