Perfect Piste Grooming

Skis rack Travel to France by ferry and some of the best self drive skiing in the world. Enjoy the freedom of taking unlimited baggage and up to 9 people per car via .
Book your journey with P&O Ferries

Find a hotel

Booking a hotel has never been easier with accorhotels.com, Europe's largest hotel group.

Why pay for your skis?

Experience complete comfort on SWISS flights to Geneva and enjoy the added bonus of taking your skis at no extra cost.

Pick up and ski this winter

Forget about queuing for a bus at the airport, low cost car hire - with a ski rack if necessary, will get you to where you want to go with a minimum of fuss. See the

Great deals to ski destinations

Flights from Southwest England, Birmingham and the Isle of Man to Chambery or Geneva opens up a wealth of ski opportunities in the northern Alps.
Book with Flybe now!

Out and about with the piste-groomers.

winch-equipped groomer at night
Winch-equipped Pisten Bully groomer at night.

When the lifts finally fall silent and the entire ski domaine has been duly signed off by the teams of pisteurs who’ve just skied every single run, it’s time for the piste-groomers to begin their highly-skilled overnight task of putting back what another day’s skiing has taken out. It’s a tough life being a piste.

While you’re sleeping...

Peer out from your apartment in the dead of night and you’ll probably glimpse their headlight patterns in the far distance, among a swirl of snow-flurries. The piste preparation teams (or, more correctly, ‘les dameurs’) are mostly nocturnal, working two back-to-back night shifts to cover each dusk-to-dawn period. While you’re sleeping soundly under the duvet you can bet that the dameurs will be out there somewhere very lonely in the darkness performing tasks such as restoring tired pistes and rutted drag-lift tracks to near-virgin flatness, nudging nearby reserves of drifted snow onto thin patches, and much more besides. Poor snow-cover can be unavoidable in more exposed areas, where prevailing winds can blow the fresh snow away as fast as it falls, so the piste-groomers get to know where to find reserves of snow, whether drifted or nudged into sheltered spots for later use by the teams themselves.

piste groomers
Winch-equipped and standard groomers ready for work at Samoëns 1600.

Only the lonely...

It can get (very) lonely up there. Even in daylight, if visibility suddenly drops, skiers can lose their bearings in seconds, but the groomer drivers must know their mountains intimately even at night and in blizzard conditions. In big ski areas this ultimate local knowledge can take a couple of seasons to acquire. Even then, the unexpected can still happen, so to keep the drivers in constant contact with their control centre (and each other) they’re armed with GPS, avalanche transceivers and of course mobile phones. And just to keep spirits up they also have hi-fi systems and formidable cab heaters. Home-from-home, really.
Not that life here is exactly a picnic; riding on wide, metal-bladed tracks means that progress, even on soft snow, tends to feel nerve-janglingly firm – not ideal when the controls are light and amazingly sensitive, thanks to power assistance for all the main functions. Naturally this includes the massive bulldozer-style front blade capable of shifting whole walls of wind-drifted snow or reserves created by snow-canon.

A light touch...

Once an even snow base has been established the real process of grooming (or ‘conditioning’) begins. Again this requires sensitive and precise handling, with the front blade in minimal contact with the surface - merely flattening it sufficiently to allow the rotating blades at the rear of the vehicle to whip up compacted snow, aerating it before final smoothing by a heavy, serrated rubber blade. The end result is the trade-mark lined surface which tells skiers that les dameurs have done their work well.

Above, L-R: Preparing for work; in-cab controls are surprisingly light; a brief encounter relieves the solitude;
extending the winch cable for a spot of steep terrain grooming.

It comes at a price...

Grooming, like other operational costs, doesn’t come cheap. Each vehicle costs around 250,000 euros and the Grand Massif has thirteen of them, including a few with a neat trick up their sleeve. Add a beefy 3.5 tonne winch and around 1000m of steel cable (a worthwhile option at 50,000 euros) to your groomer, attach the cable to a secure anchor-point and you can happily wind your way up and down otherwise impossibly steep pistes in perfect safety. Yes, that’s how they do it.
With the 12 litre 435bhp power units consuming fuel at the rate of 250 litres per vehicle per shift, and eye-watering prices for the inevitable replacement parts needed to keep the show, or rather the snow, on the mountain (a winch cable alone can cost upwards of 6000 euros), a clear picture is emerging. And don't even think about what might happen to the delicate machinery if the groomer driver should locate that ski or pole you lost earlier somewhere on the piste. Still wondering why your lift-pass is becoming pricier? Passions Icon

Our Hosts

We produced this report in the Grand Massif domaine, situated in the Haute-Savoie region of the French Alps. One of the largest linked ski areas in France, it comprises over 133 runs (265km) with 78 ski lifts which connect the ski villages of :
Flaine
Les Carroz
Samoëns
Morillon
Sixt Fer à Cheval