jamesdeluxe
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2020
For my seventh and final day of this visit, I drove less than 20 minutes from my B&B in the village of Guillestre -- a really convenient headquarters for this region -- to the large interconnected circuit called the "Forêt Blanche" (White Forest) consisting of Vars and Risoul (pronounced Ree ZOOL). It's the second southernmost French megaresort following the Espace Lumière with easily five days' worth of exploring between the two sides.
I started out at the Vars Sainte Marie parking lot:
From there, you take two high-speed chairs to one of the sub peaks. Here's a wide angle view of the main bowl with about two-thirds of the Vars terrain in view. It's three miles across and has 3,100 verts. Far from the biggest in France, but more than enough for those of us from the U.S. northeast.
A bit further down -- the terrain along that ridgeline is accessible via lifts. You can reach the chutes at the top (which are above my pay grade) with bit of bootpacking:
Reverse shot: you can see the lift where I started at the far right.
Vars is great for people who want to rack up groomer miles via high-speed lifts:
Now we're getting to the interesting part for this season -- due to a disagreement between Vars and Risoul about ticket revenue sharing, the interconnect between the two resorts (in place since 1976) is closed. Of course, you can go around the "closed" signs and cross the border, so to speak; however, your ticket from the other side won't be valid and you'll have to pay another 47 euros to ride the lifts there. Still, there's enough skiable terrain at Vars alone for at least 2.5 days.
In addition to the map in the photo above only showing Vars, all signs indicating crossover points to the other resort (see pic below) have been removed -- exactly like it used to be in divided Berlin, where I lived in 1986-87. It's a very odd development given that France has always led the way in creating huge interconnected ski circuits, much more than the other Alps countries.
Around 11:45, I stopped for an early lunch at Restaurant Barjo, which is French slang for crazy, insane:
To the left of the sign, intermediate offpiste on the lower mountain was skiing well:
To the right of the sign, you can see a bit of the main village Vars les Claux below:
There are certainly more unsightly villages in the French Alps but still, the multi-story 70s/80s buildings are not what I want to see on a ski trip. It's understandable that they need to build out the bed base to accommodate destination visitors, but a shame IMO that they put up these things such a gorgeous environment:
On the other side of the village is the north-facing Peynier sector where there's lots of tree skiing and a few fun cruisers:
Similar to the other ski areas where there hadn't been any new snow since the previous weekend, the most enjoyable ungroomed terrain was where it'd been skied in and the sun had warmed it by early afternoon to somewhere between chalk and sugar.
Throughout the week, I saw a lot of these areas specifically set up for brown baggers so they don't try to eat at the tables of the privately-owned and -operated F&B establishments. A nice compromise:
Returning to my B&B in Guillestre: I drove over the "Arroyo of Cow Piss"!!
So that's it, another Alps trip in the can. This one was unique in that I almost always score a powder day or two to refresh surfaces. Still, conditions were fine for the most part and I couldn't complain too much about seven days of sun.
I started out at the Vars Sainte Marie parking lot:
From there, you take two high-speed chairs to one of the sub peaks. Here's a wide angle view of the main bowl with about two-thirds of the Vars terrain in view. It's three miles across and has 3,100 verts. Far from the biggest in France, but more than enough for those of us from the U.S. northeast.
A bit further down -- the terrain along that ridgeline is accessible via lifts. You can reach the chutes at the top (which are above my pay grade) with bit of bootpacking:
Reverse shot: you can see the lift where I started at the far right.
Vars is great for people who want to rack up groomer miles via high-speed lifts:
Now we're getting to the interesting part for this season -- due to a disagreement between Vars and Risoul about ticket revenue sharing, the interconnect between the two resorts (in place since 1976) is closed. Of course, you can go around the "closed" signs and cross the border, so to speak; however, your ticket from the other side won't be valid and you'll have to pay another 47 euros to ride the lifts there. Still, there's enough skiable terrain at Vars alone for at least 2.5 days.
In addition to the map in the photo above only showing Vars, all signs indicating crossover points to the other resort (see pic below) have been removed -- exactly like it used to be in divided Berlin, where I lived in 1986-87. It's a very odd development given that France has always led the way in creating huge interconnected ski circuits, much more than the other Alps countries.
Around 11:45, I stopped for an early lunch at Restaurant Barjo, which is French slang for crazy, insane:
To the left of the sign, intermediate offpiste on the lower mountain was skiing well:
To the right of the sign, you can see a bit of the main village Vars les Claux below:
There are certainly more unsightly villages in the French Alps but still, the multi-story 70s/80s buildings are not what I want to see on a ski trip. It's understandable that they need to build out the bed base to accommodate destination visitors, but a shame IMO that they put up these things such a gorgeous environment:
On the other side of the village is the north-facing Peynier sector where there's lots of tree skiing and a few fun cruisers:
Similar to the other ski areas where there hadn't been any new snow since the previous weekend, the most enjoyable ungroomed terrain was where it'd been skied in and the sun had warmed it by early afternoon to somewhere between chalk and sugar.
Throughout the week, I saw a lot of these areas specifically set up for brown baggers so they don't try to eat at the tables of the privately-owned and -operated F&B establishments. A nice compromise:
Returning to my B&B in Guillestre: I drove over the "Arroyo of Cow Piss"!!
So that's it, another Alps trip in the can. This one was unique in that I almost always score a powder day or two to refresh surfaces. Still, conditions were fine for the most part and I couldn't complain too much about seven days of sun.
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