Val Thorens Snow Report : 14th January 2013

I can’t give anybody advice about where to go on a powder day – you should always hire an instructor or guide if you want to go off-piste – but I can report on a couple of the classic easy off-piste areas we visited this weekend, ones that you might well do with your guide.

The first is the relatively shallow flank between the Cretes piste and St Martin de Belleville. This is a place where instructors often take their client for a first off-piste sortie as it is fairly easy to get back onto the groomed runs if everything goes horribly wrong. As with all off-piste routes, there are potential traps – steeper areas which might avalanche, rocks, streams, tree stumps, alder bushes – and if you take the wrong route you can leave yourself with a long push out. However, this is often a glorious place to be after a snowfall thanks to the long easy descents with a constant pitch.

A second route we took is from the Grand Lac run towards Bettex, a village below Les Menuires. We passed picturesque shepherds’ huts and gradually descend below the tree-line to the resort, crossing a few roads and streams in the process. The lower pitch here can get quite heavy on a warm day, just as your legs are beginning to tire, but there are plenty of restaurants and bars at the bottom to revive you at the end.

If you are a keen off-piste skier, it’s well worth buying the beautifully illustrated guide book Les Cles des 3 Vallees by mountain guide Didier Givois. This hardback book is in English and French and gives details of all the classic routes around this ski area – a perfect gift for a keen skier. It is on sale at the bookshops in resort.

The snow on piste is lovely too, with just the odd harder patch on some lower slopes. Skiing back home to Méribel at the end of our day we encountered this adorable little bundle of fur crossing the main Combe tougnete piste. He took shelter for a while under a ski before hopping off back towards his hole. He was, I believe, a campagnol, a member of the vole family, after whom a piste is named in Mottaret. It might not have been a wildlife sighting on par with the Serengeti, but it was a charming and unexpected reminder that there is plenty of fauna in the mountains even during the depths of winter.