Skiing at Les Houches, France

 

After tagging along with our friends to a party in Chamonix last night, we opted for a more relaxed start today by skiing at our local slopes of Les Houches. Rather than have to take any buses, we could simply walk outside, cross the road and get into the cable car. Due to the lack of snow cover, only about one third of the resort is open for skiing. At least there was a slight benefit of this; the cost of the lift passes had also been well reduced too. 

It was a speedy 900m uplift from the shadows of the valley, into the glorious alpine morning sunshine. It was quite a panorama.

 

As the morning wore on, clouds began to fill the Chamonix valley, but the mountain tops stayed bathed in sunshine. I love being above the clouds and spent all available time on the chair lifts and cable cars marvelling at it.

 

If there wasn't loads of snow, there certainly wasn't loads of people. We never qued for a lift and at times were the only two skiers on the slope. Happy days indeed. 

 

Given the meagre amounts of snow, the resort had done an amazing job of maintaining it. Best of all was that they'd managed to keep the run open all the way back to the valley which gave a lovely long, uninterrupted ski. We did it multiple times and by mid afternoon had clocked over 6000m of vertical descent! 

 

Keeping the budget in check today, we skied to the village bakery for lunch and once our legs had had enough, we skied home for coffee and cake. It was tempting to take a nap, but instead we got changed and took the bus into town to browse the shops. 

Chamonix is a well known hub for the mountaineering types and we'd literally walked about 10m from the bus when a friend who we'd not seen in a few years jumped up from a cafe table and invited us to join him and his friend. We'd actually all done our first winter Alpine climb together here years ago! Later we bumped into some friends from back home as well as we were buying the classic 'steak, chips and cheese' toasted baguette from our favourite little bar on the Main Street. Before heading home for dinner, Clare picked up a bargain pair of insulated ski trousers in one of the many ski shops as the temperatures are set to stay low!