J2Ski group holiday to Tignes January 13th 2013

:D

Now we're on a new page I'd like to remind people that there is still time (just) to book a place in the chalet Bonjour-Bonjour on our J2Ski group holiday to Tignes Les Brevieres on 13th January 2013. The details are on the first page of this thread.

The closing date to book as part of the group is 1st May. After this you can still book a place yourself directly through the Bonjour company.

Whilst I was out there (I'm in London now) I discovered why the free ski bus doesn't run to Les Brevieres. It's because the usual road from Les Boisses down to it turns into the blue piste :lol:

In order to get to Les Brevieres from the main part of Tignes in the winter you have to drive back over the dam and down the main road towards Bourg-St-Maurice before turning off. I was told this road is a route nationale and free ski buses aren't allowed on it. So this is why they use the chairlift between Les Boisses and Les Brevieres as an extension of the free bus system, and pedestrians and skiers are allowed on it without lift passes.

We have new photos we've just taken of Les Brevieres and Tignes but they're on my daughter's phone and it will be a while before I can post them up here - maybe later today after I get home.

Welcome back Ally, looking forward to seeing your pictures and hearing all about the resort.

Here are some photos, taken by my daughter with her phone, of our recent trip to Tignes:



The Bonjour-Bonjour chalet in the snow.



This is ski-ing down into Les Brevieres - showing Les Boisses and the dam wall.



This one shows the snow-plough at work on Tuesday (24th April) in Les Brevieres

This is taken from the top above Les Brevieres.

Me - carrying out important research for this group holiday :lol:

AllyG wrote:

Me - carrying out important research for this group holiday :lol:

Good pics & thanks for putting them on, just one thing Ally are those your skis in the pic & if they are were sitting down next to them or do you use giant skis :shock:

Hi Brooksy,
I must say I wondered if I'd shrunk when I saw that photo :lol:

I think I'm sitting down in the gondola studying the piste map. I'm not sure but I think it's possibly the Sache gondola that goes up from Les Brevieres.

We did so many lifts and pistes in such a short space of time that they've become a bit blurred in my memory now :lol:

The first day was beautifully sunny and we did about 15 pistes, including the memorable frog spawn-like black Olympique down into Val d'Isere. The second day it snowed heavily all day and some of the upper lifts stayed shut.

It was an excellent day to learn how to ski powder. We started by struggling to walk through the powder from the road at Les Boisses to find the piste. And then it was a bit of a problem trying to get our skis on. Finally we had to ski down into Les Brevieres through deep untouched powder on the blue myrtilles piste and then we did a short-cut onto the red pavot piste near the bottom of it.

Ski-ing down that in masses of powder was really good fun, because it was steep enough to go reasonably fast but not scary because it was wide and straight and we were directly in front of the village and the Sache gondola and the ESF ski schools lined up waiting for the gondola to open. I'd had lessons in how to ski powder, so in theory I knew how to do it, but I hadn't had such a good chance to practise it before in such nice surroundings.

I am very proud of my powder ski-ing abilities now. Even my very critical daughter said I looked quite good.

Once the Brevieres chair lift was going we went up to Les Boisses on it and back down the blue finishing on the red again. So I know for sure it makes a nice easy circuit. It was quite amusing as well, because there was a group of 3 boys from our chalet (the same ones who went around on the wrong ski bus for half an hour) stuck in a heap rolling around in the powder just down from the road who were still stuck there when we went around for the second time :lol:

And once the gondola started we went higher up. The memorable piste for that day was the red Double M that comes down from the Grand Motte glacier into Val Claret. My daughter said it was her favourite piste in the whole of the Espace Killy. It is a lovely piste but in all that powder I found it totally exhausting and I couldn't believe it when I finally made it to the bottom and she said let's do it again! So I retreated to researching another cafe - the nearest one to the bottom of the piste, which did very nice hot chocolate, whilst she went around again. But that was the only run I dodged out of during the 3 days.

The final day we went all the way to the top of the Val d'Isere glacier (which is at the other end of the Espace Killy) and back, which involved going up 16 lifts and down 17 pistes. And we had to go pretty fast to make sure we were back in the chalet by 3 p.m. to catch the mini-bus at 4 p.m. back to Geneva.

I have to say my daughter's navigation was pretty good. She'd been out there the week before Christmas with her uni and she knew where all the lifts and short-cuts etc. were.

I did have my doubts though, at certain points. Like, for example, at the top of the Solaise above Val d'Isere when she headed off straight past a big notice that said 'piste tres difficile - bons skieurs'. I was really worried then that it would be something like the Sache. But it wasn't too bad. It was steep and a bit bumpy and icy and there didn't really seem to be a piste in the top section - but I made it down okay, very carefully! It's called the red piste Plan which turns into the red M and goes all the way down into Val d'Isere.

She's marked the piste map for me, showing where we went, and I'm thinking about trying to put it up here somehow, showing our route, and writing some annotations for it. Like, for example on the way out we went down the long blue Santon into Val d'Isere and it turned into a horribly difficult half-pipe near the bottom followed by an icy schusse run and then a long flat section into the village.

And then I could take my notes with me for when we're out there as a group :D

At the end of ski-ing Tignes for 3 days I reached the conclusion that it would be very difficult for a lower intermediate to manage to ski around the area on their own just relying on the gradings on the piste map. And I also noticed that the average skier when we were there was a much better skier than one in the 3 Valleys. When in the 3 Valleys I am usually a slightly better skier than the average one and have to overtake people, but in the Espace Killy I was slightly worse and got overtaken frequently :lol: