Courchevel - Part I

For our final ski trip of the season, Emilie and I spent the weekend in the French resort town of Courchevel with her mom and sister. Courchevel is about 100 miles south of Lausanne as the crow flies and is part of the Les Trois Vallées (the three valleys) – the largest interlinked ski area in the world (at least that’s what it claims).

We drove up Friday night and found a nice restaurant in town for dinner. Upon our arrival we were quickly able to confirm a major stereotype of Courchevel – i.e., that is known as the ski resort of choice for the wealthy Russian elite. Russian was the primary language at probably half the tables and many of the signs in the restaurant were in Russian as well.

The food was very good. I decided to order one of the regional specialties – tartiflette – which is a baked cheese, potato and bacon concoction that is one of my favorites.

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We awoke on Saturday to a light snow fall and when I looked out the window I could see that it had been snowing all night. We had set our expectations relatively low for the snow conditions given the warm weather and Spring-like conditions that had been present for the past month, but we ended up getting quite lucky with the arrival of some new powder.

We decided to limit our skiing to Courchevel the first day rather than getting the full Trois Vallées ski pass, which we planned to do on Sunday. And aside from some minor slush at lower elevations, the snow conditions were very good overall. Even better, the mountain was relatively empty.

As can be seen from the pictures, it was partially cloudy most of the day. Here’s a picture of Emilie and Cécile, taking a break from beating me down every run.

We grabbed a late lunch and had a view overlooking the runway of the Courchevel “airport”, which is basically on the mountain and adjacent to some of the slopes. Supposedly the runway is one of the shortest in the world and requires a special pilot license to land there. Base on what I saw, I’m not surprised.

Over the course of our lunch, it turned into a complete white out and at times we couldn’t even see the runway anymore. There was a plane preparing to take off when we placed our order, but it apparently had to stay grounded due to the limited visibility and returned to the hangar.

After lunch Emilie and I planned to ski for a while longer, but the white-out got so bad that you literally couldn’t see where to go. As a sign of how bad it was, Emilie even fell a couple of times (something I’ve never witnessed from her before) because she had to lead the way and was the victim of some large moguls on particularly steep sections of an advanced run.

As such, we decided to call it a day and head back to the hotel. Here’s a picture of the view from our room looking up at the mountain.

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For dinner we went to Azimut, a small restaurant outside Courchevel. Given the size, it felt a bit like eating in someone’s house and made for a very good experience. We even got a small side-room area, which was nice as it allowed for a little privacy. I decided to have tartiflette (again) and enjoyed it very much.