Winter & Ski Home Ski Resort Reviews Alps Montgenèvre

Franco-Italian skiing: the Dream Ticket?

IN THE SOUTHERN FRENCH ALPS close to Briançon, Serre-Chevalier and beside the border with Italy, Montgenèvre offers good-value, quality skiing for all levels, plus an infectious cosmopolitan vibe.
You can access Montgenèvre by air and a quick transfer from Turin or you can even take a direct train from Paris to Oulx, just over the Italian border. Driving from the UK is long and expensive but the reward is limitless skiing in an impressive, snow-sure resort.

Montgenèvre’s ski area is both varied and extensive. The village ski area extends over 75km and includes a huge, safe beginners area on the front de neige. There's vast intermediate territory on both sides of the valley, in the Gondrans sector and Le Chalvet. The wooded Prarial sector is packed with fairly short but fun reds and sheltered blues.

Most skiers prefer to take the Monts de la Lune option (110km) and be able to ski over the border into Clavière, Italy. You need to be a confident intermediate to go over the top via the difficult Crete draglift, but the blue runs from Le Prarial are delightful.

Mile-hungry skiers can explore over 400km of groomed pistes in the biggest international ski domain known as the Vialattea [Milky Way], which includes the ski terrain of Clavière, Cesana, San Sicario, Sestrière and Sauze d’Oulx. Off-piste potential is thus near-limitless.

Montgenèvre has successfully transformed its image and its fortunes, with massive investment in accommodation and ski infrastructure. The busy road into Italy has been tucked underground, leaving the heart of the village practically traffic-free. New chalet style apartments and a luxury hotel restaurant completed in 2008/09 began the expansion into the new up-market Hameau de l'Obelisque area which has easy access to one of two recent télémix (half gondolas / half chairs) lifts.

The charming old village exists behind the facade of bars, restaurants and shops which extend the length of the front de neige.

There's terrain for everyone here. Families will love the safe environment for children, and novice skiers can easily access some of the best and most plentiful intermediate territory on offer anywhere in the Alps. Off-piste opportunities and the option to explore other ski areas make Montgenèvre a top class destination.

Somehow the Col du Lauteret has escaped the previous day’s heavy snowfalls, making the often demanding drive from Grenoble a pleasure. When we reach Montgenèvre it’s immediately obvious where the snow-clouds had been targeting; simply getting to our accommodation, between high walls of freshly-bulldozed snow, requires the hasty fitting of snow-chains.

From Le Chalvet (2630m) Briançon appears far below, dwarfed still further by the dramatic backdrop of les Briançonnais mountains.

The sun is also sinking slowly, with the promise of fine weather for the coming week. Sure enough, the following morning finds us schussing off from the newly-developed Hameau de l’Obelisque area of the village down to the Serre Thibaud lift in still-freezing temperatures, beneath a steely blue sky. The new high-speed ‘télémix’ lift, one of a pair added for the 2008/9 season, combines six-seater chairs with gondola-style cabins [which we’ll come to favour during chillier periods] and has opened up some very worthwhile new terrain. It will become even more so as the plan to extend the terrain into nearby Mont Chaberton advances during the next few years.

A gentle start...

From the top we warm up on Pharo and then Suffin, which between them create a satisfyingly long, gentle descent back to our starting point. Later we’ll discover that the new lift offers back-door access to Clavière via Baïsses, another long, blue cruiser whose graceful plunge through a deep valley after which it is named enters silent woodland trails lower down.

The first few tracks appear on the irresistible fresh snow below the Rocher de l’Aigle, gateway to the Monts de la Lune.

For now, though, we follow the cross-border link indicated on the piste-map, which takes us way, way up to the Rocher de l’Aigle. The climb involves a couple of lift changes, rising through rich forests of pine and larch, then opens onto spectacular wide open powder bowls as-yet tracked by a only very few off-piste skiers. At the top there’s the option of cruising all the way back down to the valley floor but for now we’re in no mood to resist the huge views unfolding before us all the way to Sestrière and beyond.

Into a lunar landscape...

The exhilarating onward plunge takes us into the Monts de la Lune sector, where we’re gliding in a Zen-like state with not another soul in sight. Our passion for skiing is fired by moments like these. After a sudden brief plunge into the tree-line we let the skis run through winding forest tracks, with a final burst to clear a flat area which heralds the drop into La Coche — the perfect Italian lunch-spot.

We emerge an hour later, smiling and fuelled for any challenge, but it takes just a couple of minutes to drop down into the compact but charming ski village of Clavière. From here it’s hard to believe that Montgenèvre lies just a kilometre or so up the valley, and as we’ll discover, you can be back across the frontier in no time, with a choice of routes. We decide to take a brief stroll up to Montquitaine, an old two-seater fixed chairlift which drops us neatly onto our old friend Suffin, for a gentle cruise back to the hotel.
This near-perfect circuit will become a favourite during our stay — which isn’t to say that nothing else comes close. Each time we explore a new area we’re simply bowled over. Les Gondrans, for example, begins beside an old Ligne Maginot fort and offers lots of wide open cruising, with a half-pipe for boarders along the way. Le Chalvet, on the other hand, has top-of-the-world panoramic views, with a mountain restaurant at the foot of its steep-and-deep Red and Black pistes.

But heroics aren’t for everyone, and anyway even heroes need to wind down sooner or later. ‘Serene’ probably goes some way to describing the much gentler Sagna Longa area, between La Coche and Cesana — to which we’d have to add ‘desirable’, judging by the array of showpiece chalets sited here in just about the perfect setting.

The remains of a high-altitude Ligne Maginot border fort look even more melancholy amid a snowy landscape.

By now you’ll have guessed the thought which enters our mind repeatedly during our time here: it’s hard to believe the sheer variety of skiing to be enjoyed on the Montgenèvre/Monts de la Lune lift pass (and the Vialattea adds a whole lot more). Add the perfect combination of a great snow record, high altitude and 300+ days of sunshine annually and you’ll see why we think you’re going to be hearing a lot more about Montgenèvre.

© Roger Moss