Just when you think you’ve got her worked out, Mother Nature sticks her ivy-clad ankle out to trip you up. This weeks forecast called for a grey and rainy week, with high freezing levels to wash all the low-lying snow out, and to effectively kill anything between 2000-3000m. Instead, the opposite has happened. Sunshine most of the week, and snow to 2000m most evenings.

As I write this, the sky is a bold, inky purple colour and the mountains either side of the Aiguille de Midi are bathed in pinky alpenglow. There is fresh snow on the trees to 1300m, which means that the springtime new green growth in town is juxtaposed beautifully with the white just a little higher up. I rebuilt my mountain bike yesterday, and put summer wax on a couple of my snowboards, but now I’m not sure if I want to board or bike tomorrow. Such is the decision for those of us who abandoned the flatland, and found higher hopes at higher heights.

Meanwhile, town is blissfully quiet; the locals, out from winter hibernation at hot stoves or behind desks, are out and the trickle of Savoyard-accented French flows through the streets mingling only with laughter, birdsong and the very occasional passing car.

 If you haven’t noticed, it’s my favourite time of year. Tomorrow is 1st May and it’ll be the next powder day of a season full of them. Brevent and Le Tour shut their doors last weekend; Les Houches went the same way. Now all that is left is Les Grands Montets for powder and Flégère for slush. Lift queues don’t happen and the average standard of rider up on the mountain is very high. If you make it to Chamonix before we close on the 11th May, I’ll see you here. If you don’t, then I just hope that you managed to get to the Alps to share part of what was one of the best snow seasons in European recent history, and that you have a wonderful summer, be it at the end of a rope, under a parapente canopy, or on the saddle of a mountain bike.

Ciao!

Had an excellent day today at the superfinal of the Hally Hansen Winter Ride contest up at Grands Montets today. The snow was deep and fluffy, with a really low moisture content, which made for terrific February-quality turns, and blue skies overhead helping everybody’s gogglemarks along nicely. After the timed descent, we took powder run after powder run down onto the Argentière glacier, guaranteeing tired legs and big smiles tonight. If you’ve ever been there, to that magical bluebird day place, then yes…it was one of those great days. If you haven’t been there, book your plane ticket to Cham right now.

Life is rosy here in the valley! A sunny morning saw a full car park at Les Grands Montets, with every powder-hound for 150 miles seemingly descending to eat up some of the fresh snow that’s been falling to 1200m since I last wrote. When I got up the hill at lunchtime today, there wasn’t a pocket of fresh to be found; just a warm, sunkissed end-of-term feeling in the air with smiles everywhere.

The park is in great shape with the soft snow, which became slushier in the afternoon, but if jibbing isn’t your thing then the pistes are in excellent condition in all of the resorts of the valley. The Le Tour and Les Grands Montets ski outs are open and all lifts are running. In fact, the only resort to have remotely suffered following the higher snowline has been Les Houches, which is looking a bit skidmarky and probably not worth the journey.

Bon ski!

Conditions here in Chamonix continue to be excellent - and by that, I mean everything above 2000m/2500m is about as good as it gets.

It’s odd; we live in a time where people talk of doom and gloom; the death of skiing in the Alps, global warming eliminating the snow, and glaciers melting away to nothing. The same people who talk this talk are the ones who ski over Christmas, in January and see February half-term as pretty much as late as the season gets. They fail to realise that winter hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just moved forward two months. If it’s epic powder you’re looking for, come in March. If you want to ski soft snow in the sun, come in April. If skiing on grass in the rain is your thing, by all means stop by in December.

Lucky for us, then, that ski school Evolution 2 waited until after Easter to hold their Grand Raid event. It’s a race at Les Grands Montets, where teams of two make their way down long off-piste faces as quick as they can. This year, there were five stages; top to bottom via the glacier, Lavancher Bowl, Magic Forest and two variants of the Italian Bowl. It was excellent fun, if not exceptionally hard on the legs, and my partner and I were really happy to place seventh of 18, beating all but two of the pro freeride teams.

After a killer weekend - more on that later - we were greeted with thick, fast-falling snowflakes as we walked home from a meal last night. We had been to Casa Valerio, one of my favourite haunts in town due to their excellent pizza and pasta dishes, and it felt like January again as we walked back to the apartment.

To top it off, this morning I woken up by avalanche bombs, looked out of my window and saw 1″ of snow on my car under a blue sky. Happy days!

It had to happen! After without doubt the dump of the season last weekend with nightly top-ups over the last few days, the sun has come out in earnest and high valley and mid-mountain temperatures have turned the dry stuff into not-so-dry stuff. Nature is reminding us that mountain bike season is just a couple of weeks away (So soon!!! I know!!!), and with that comes the scourge of Chamonix, the dreaded Foehn wind that the locals call the ’snow-eater’. This warm and dry stream is due to blow through town tomorrow and will doubtless do a good job of clearing out anything under 1200m. If you were planning on skiing to Chamonix from Brevent or La Flegere again this winter, think again.

Fortunately, snow on Monday, so it might very well be winter again before long. Bring four seasons of wardrobe if headed this way.

There is a lot of snow in Chamonix at the moment. There’s a foot in town and tons more up the mountain. Yesterday we rode Les Houches, which was deep and light, and we took this shot of my girlfriend and her car in Chamonix town yesterday afternoon. To say that is has snowed is an understatement…and the powder was Utah quality. Avalanche bombs are going off hourly around the valley and the Le Tour and the whole Col de Montets area is closed up. Good times ahead….careful out there people!

The last couple of days have been some of the most eventful of the season. On Monday, one of the bigger storms of the season rolled through, and we headed up to Flegére to find some gaps in the clouds to ski some powder around the groomers. Unfortunately, this proved optimistic as the cloud was very thick and it was even difficult to see our skis and boards under our feet at times! Luckily it was snowing hard all day so we knew we had good things to look forward to the day after.

We headed home and quickly made a reservation for the Grands Montets top cable car for the next day. This is a system that not many people know about; the Compagnie du Mont Blanc website has quite a user-friendly facility to avoid the lift lines which get huge for the top on powder days. Check it out. Anyway, we got on the 11.05am bin and headed straight off the back of Les Grands Montets to an area known as the Grand Mur. It’s one of the gnarlier lines up there and is a steep open bowl that empties out onto the Argentière Glacier. In places there must have been a metre of fresh snow - light, crisp and dry…pretty much as good as it gets. After we got back over to Lognan, the midstation, we went for some other steep shots inside the resort that had us bootpacking up couloirs and over ridgelines to find fresh tracks. Unreal.

Wednesday we headed up to Les Grands Montets again for the Boss des Bosses (French for bumps) competition. It took place above the Plan Joran restaurant, on a steepish pitch with moguls the size of Minis and a couple of biggish kickers at the bottom. It was great to catch up with a lot of familiar faces from seasons past and present and there was a great vibe at the event. I’m told it continued into the wee hours at Le Terrasse, with Zermatt celebrating victory over Chamonix and the other resorts, but I had to head back to the snowsports shop where I work. Waiting for us as we opened were a pair of guides, carrying a snowboard we had rented to a client earlier that day. There had been an avalanche accident up on the Vallée Blanche while we were at the competition, and the guy who rented the board…well, he died. It was a terrible reminder of just how vicious these mountains are. It feels otherworldly to remember talking to him and his friends that morning as they took their gear. Positive vibes to his friends and family…who must be going through hell right now.

It was with caution, however, that we headed up to Brevent today to ride the Hotel Face. My friend Emily, in town from Park City, hadn’t ridden Europe before so I gave her a guided tour of some of my favourite spots. We took a bunch of pictures and skied some steep lines, but in the back of my head all day was yesterday’s accident so we tip-toed around anything we weren’t 100% sure of. I hope you like the pictures.

We had a good time riding Brevent today; visibility was patchy and light flat - yellow lenses recommended if you’re headed out this week or next - but there was the promised 20cm on the mountain. The snow that had fallen just above town burned off pretty quickly, and anything under 2500m fell victim to fast-rising temperatures, so by lunchtime had the consistency of Haagen-Daazs. The snow at the top was good quality light powder, the only downside being you couldn’t really see anything through the cloud above 2500m, so you had to know where to go. Our regular powder lines off the Cornu chairlift at Brevent delivered.

As I write, big, gloopy, silver flakes of snow are falling in the street outside my window and since it started up half an hour ago, there’s a nice thin white paste over everthing outside. Bring on tomorrow!

It seems more and more that the start and the end of the winter are the most powder-sure times in the Alps. And that’s certainly true this year! After heavy rain in town (1000m) all night, we woke to blue skies and a VERY low snowline of 1300m. That means that although Chamonix itself is a bit damp, the snow is covering the trees just above the town centre which makes for picture-postcard views and excellent skiing up top on the 30cm of fresh that’s down.

This week sees the famed Boss des Bosses inter-resort moguls competition at Les Grands Montets. More about the social thing and drinking than it is about the competition, the event attracts ski bums for hundreds of kilometres and, normally, uber-ski-bum Glenn Plake. See you there!