J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by AllyG

Thanks very much Andy :D

You're quite right, we are on a new page, and the details of this holiday are on the first page. The special discount for our J2Ski group booking finishes on 1st May, which is Tuesday.

However, if anyone decides later on that they'd like to come with us they can still book directly with Bonjour themselves, as long as there is still room in the chalet.

Hi Andy,
I reckon my daughter would have to have several broken arms and legs before she'd agree to go DOWN in a lift if there was a piste available :lol:

But I will bear it in mind if we're ski-ing in a group and someone doesn't want to ski that awkward short bit of the black Trolles and we're trying to get back from Toviere.

We skied home the first day via the Palafour lift up from Le Lac and then the Aiguille Percee. I was really worried about the time and how tired I was but my daughter insisted on going up that way.

Near the top we saw a skier who was off-piste and looked lost (whilst we were in the chair lift I mean). He did 4 kick-turns, turning round and round, without progressing anywhere. And from the height we were we could see it was all rocks below him and he was on a shelf, with the Cyclamen piste uphill and towards his right (when he was facing downhill). It was gone 4 p.m. (which was why I was worrying because that lift shuts at 4-30) and starting to snow and we were the only ones left on that chairlift.

I was thinking about telling the lift operator about him when I got to the top, and then, luckily perhaps, my ski stick hit the ground as I was getting off the chairlift and I dropped it. So the lift lady came out to give it back to me and I told her about the man stuck off-piste. She didn't understand any English so I used my best French (I knew those lessons would come in handy) to tell her exactly where he was. And, she actually understood me and went off to tell the ski patrol people who were in their hut right there on the spot.

I don't know what happened in the end, but I'm very glad I did tell the lift lady or I'd have been worried sick when we were safely back in our chalet. The skier was off-piste with no avalanche equipment, and he was lost and on his own, it was snowing, and they had the yellow and black avalanche flag flying.

We got back to our chalet at 4-30 so we were cutting it rather fine ourselves :shock:

It's a very long run down from the top there, at nearly 3,000m to Les Boisses at 1850. And we went safely down the blues back to the chalet.

We were the first ones out and the last ones back in :D

OldAndy wrote:That's brave of you Ally.
Well done for offering.
Even though you haven't found the short cut to the Chaudannes lift.
:mrgreen:

Andy - don't be so annoying :evil: :lol:

Where's the short cut to the Chaudanne lift? If it avoids going down that nasty black Trolles piste when coming down from the Toviere it would be very handy to know :lol:

And, Brooksy, I am certainly NOT going to be doing any ski-guiding. When we were above Val d'Isere I actually thought it was Val Claret - all those ski resorts look exactly the same to me :oops:

The only thing I am quite sure about is how to go inbetween Les Boisses and Les Brevieres, and where the Bonjour-Bonjour chalet is :lol:

Here are the piste maps Far Queue very kindly put up for me, on the second page, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

The pink area in the top left is the Val d'Isere glacier, and Les Brevieres is bottom right. So they are at opposite ends of the Espace Killy.

Far Queue wrote:
As per your request, here are some links to pistemaps. The first is the entire Espace Killy, and the second one is a more localised map for Les Brévières.

The maps are linked to larger versions of the same picture, so clicking on them will load the full size image.



and



As you can see, there is a nice blue all the way down to the village, as well as a red and of course La Sache, so it is suitable for just about all levels of skier.

Now we're on a new page I'd like to remind everyone that there is still time if you'd like to join us on this holiday to the chalet Bonjour-Bonjour in Tignes Les Brevieres on the 13th January (details on the first page). If you'd like to come please send me a pm or post on here.

Andy,
I think what we need is something like a guide book for each resort, detailing the oddities of the pistes, lifts, and the actual resort. Maybe there is such a book?

As you say, there are lots of bits of the Espace Killy ski area suitable for beginners and lower intermediates, but without a guide it's very difficult to find them :cry:

There was a total beginner in our chalet and she had quite a difficult time, struggling with unsuitable pistes etc. when she wasn't ski-ing in a lesson, mainly because she and her OH didn't really know where to go (and all that powder on Tuesday made things even harder for her).

As regards this holiday to Les Brevieres, I think it's most important to know where the Chaudannes chair lift starts, because that's the quickest route back from Tignes 2100 to the chalet Bonjour-Bonjour.

This lift is well hidden as you have to ski along a green run through the village and under a bridge before you can see it. Coming back on Wednesday to this lift from up the top of the Toviere we had to take a strange route which involved the red Cretes, the red Combe Folle, a bit of the black Trolles, and then remembering to turn right on the Trolles (and this bit was all steep and icy) in order to get down into the village at the correct point. If my daughter hadn't known which way to go I never would have managed it :shock:

I reckon if you'd never been to Tignes/Val d'Isere before, navigating using only the piste map would be very difficult. I don't think it's as well signposted as the 3 Valleys. I didn't see a sign up for Les Brevieres or Les Boisses until we were nearly there. And you can't see them because there are a load of mountains in the way :lol:

And the pistes and lifts up on top of the Val d'Isere glacier are very confusing as well. My daughter said her uni group got muddled and kept going down to Le Fornet instead of across to Val d'Isere, so that by the time they eventually got to the right place the linking gondola from Val to Tignes (L'Olympique) was shut and they had to go to the bus station and pay for the bus from Val d'Isere back to Tignes.

But because of this experience she was very careful when we were ski-ing and she managed to find all the correct lifts and pistes :D

And I would like to stress that not everyone would have to go up 16 lifts and ski 17 pistes to get to the Val d'Isere glacier from Les Brevieres, because they could travel a lot of it on the buses starting from Les Boisses.

Edit
We won't have to worry about getting lost on our group ski holiday because Bonjour provide free ski hosting :D

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:

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

This is taken from the top above Les Brevieres.