Booking a skiing holiday for April involves taking a gamble. You can arrive to sunshine and late-season snow or barren slopes and green fields. My brother Andrew chose well, however, and the slopes of Montgenèvre in France delivered epic pistes amid glorious surroundings.
This was the second time that I’d joined my family and friends for a group holiday in the mountains but while Graham had spent a few days with us last time out in Champagny-en-Vanoise, this time my ski-loathing partner stayed at home in London. His place was taken by my other brother, Peter, who took to skiing like the proverbial duck to water despite a 20-year break from the sport.
With a shortage of reasonably priced flights to nearby Turin, we started our holiday by flying with easyJet to Milan Malpensa and driving for a bum-numbing three-hours to Montgenèvre across the plains of northern Italy, through the magnificent landscapes of the Oulx Valley. Snow was in short supply as we climbed ever higher but there was plenty of it on the north-facing slopes of Montgenèvre as we drove into town. Being so late in the season, there was very little snow in the village itself and barely any on the south-facing slopes other than a few manicured and seriously maintained runs down to the village.
Montgenèvre, which Andrew and his family had visited four years earlier, lies just a mile or two over the Italian/French border from the neighbouring resort of Claviere, on an ancient Roman road that was built 2,000 years ago to link the city state with its Spanish colonies. It lies at 1,860m above sea level and is known as much for its sunshine record as it is for its late season skiing. The heart of the village is ancient and charming, centred on a sturdy church, but otherwise Montgenèvre lacks the prettiness of a typical Swiss or Austrian Alpine village. We were staying in Chalet Blue Shutters, an historic if basic property in the centre of town that was very handy for the lifts but notable for its dreadful mattresses. Not that I slept on my bed too much for Peter’s snoring soon sent me to the sofa in the lounge/dining room.
Montgenèvre is part of the vast Milky Way ski area that stretches deep into Italy but we spent the week on the slopes around the village, in part because there was just about enough to keep us occupied but also because Claviere’s linked slopes had closed for the season. Montgenevre’s south-facing Chalvet sector offered some wonderful blue and green motorways in a glorious bowl of snow above the tree line, as well as a couple of reds and blacks that we avoided. We took the Serre Thibaud gondola/chair to the area’s 2,550m peak a few times but the L’Alpet drag lift that also serves the sector is tortuous, endless and slow and one trip on it proved quite enough.
The green Suffin piste back to the valley floor was fine early in the morning but once the sun had gone to work it rapidly turned to slush and became a knee-wrenching nightmare and one of my least favourite runs. The lower part of the nearby Pharo blue was just as stodgy but steeper in parts so we only skied it the once. Returning to the south-facing slopes on the other side of the valley, we took the Tremplin chairlift up through the trees, skied down a blue run to the Brousset chair and then rode the Rocher de l’Aigle chairlift up to Eagle Rock. From the top a red run, the Soureou, plunged challengingly through dramatic scenery and was enjoyable when the weather was good. One day, when I was seriously tired and in need of lunch, Peter took us up and into murky weather that made the top of the red an absolute nightmare. With my right knee playing up and visibility poor, I gingerly and fractiously made my way down to a restaurant in the valley, close by the slushy nursery slopes, and restored my body and my mood with food and beer.
The neighbouring south-facing Gondrans sector is the prettiest of the ski areas, much of it above the tree line and with several great motorway pistes – green, blue and red – from the 2,500m peaks. Serviced in the main by the Observatoire and Gondrans chairs, the bowl threw up unbelievable views of the Alps, the village below and a number of bleak mountain-top forts built to protect the French border in years past.
It is the views, the stunning scenery and the drama of those magnificent mountains that help make a skiing holiday such a memorable and enjoyable experience. There is freedom on the slopes, a distance from the everyday, the drabness of work and the stresses and strains of life that I don’t find on any other type of holiday. It engenders a oneness with the world and a much-appreciated inner peace that is, perhaps, heightened by the risks and speed associated with bashing a piste. Not that I really pushed myself on this holiday. While the brothers, nephews and nieces registered speeds of over 40mph on their GPS trackers, I stayed down in the low 30s – conscious of my ageing bones and aching bits and pieces.
By and large we were lucky with the weather. Several days brought cloud and snow, but nothing in significant quantities, so mostly we were able to ski in warm sunshine. Our last day delivered a real mix of weather but also the sort of drama any holidaymaker wants to avoid… My team of experienced skiers had spent the week comparing speeds and miles bashed, with nephew Christopher and niece Catherine among the most competitive. It was Catherine who was the most daring but a piste with jumps was her undoing and a nasty fall on her back resulted in her being attended by medics and then taken down the mountain on a blood wagon. It was a scary moment for mum, dad and the rest of us but x-rays showed that she’d suffered nothing worse than bruising. Having seen the fall on video, she was lucky. Her salopettes, ripped beyond repair, weren’t quite so fortunate.
None of us are rabid skiers, the type that’s determined to spend every waking hour on the slopes. Long lunches and stops for vin chaud are just as important to me as the sport but Montgenèvre is surprisingly short of mountain restaurants so we often ended up in the village itself, especially in the welcoming Restaurant Les Chalmettes down by the nursery slopes. Of those we did find on the slopes, Les Terrasses in the Chalvet sector had exceptional views of the valley and the mountains beyond while Gondrans featured the convenient stop of Les Anges and its excellent vin chaud. Of an evening we enjoyed the cocktails at La Tourmente and the food at U Cintu, but Montgenèvre could never be described as an apre ski hot-spot. In fact, it was often deathly quiet whenever we went out. Some evenings we stayed in, played cards and other games, ate and drank.
By the time we came to leave, on a beautifully sunny Saturday morning, April was settling into middle age and the slopes were getting slushier and slushier. The season had just a week or two left and spring was blooming in the gardens and flower pots around town. It was time to think of summer holidays…