© Giles Towler
© rachaelhallewell
© berridge.s
© fanny_bln6
Overcast most of the week in Morzine
Visibility has been quite poor
It is now the end of the second week of the February school holidays but the slopes are currently surprisingly uncrowded. The plateau at the top of the Pleney is still quite busy, especially first thing in the morning as the ski schools gather there for their lessons. The Super Morzine lift can also suffer from long lift queues first thing but these clear up relatively quickly.
The weather conditions have been far from perfect, however. For most of the week, the weather has been overcast in town with cloud cover on most of the slopes. Visibility has been better above the clouds, whilst it has looked overcast down in Morzine there has been some sunshine up in Avoriaz. On Mt Chery, as well, there were a couple of days of sunshine with cloud down in the valley, although Mt Chery also had some very cloudy days with extremely limited visibility. Today, the cloud cover has left large parts of the valley and the lower slopes overcast but most of Avoriaz in the sun.
The temperatures have stayed low for most of the week. The snow has gone from slushy in the sun to hard packed and icy in the shade or under the cloud cover. The temperatures have got as low as -10ºC at times during the week, meaning that it has been important to wear as many layers as possible when heading up to go skiing. There was some rainfall lower down during the week and sleet higher up but not a significant amount. The last snowfall was approximately 10cm last Saturday. There is still a base of about 2m at the bottom of the slopes and over 3.5m higher up.
Almost the entire lift system is currently open. Throughout the whole of the Portes du Soleil, 271 out of 281 pistes are open and one 197 out of 203 lifts are currently operating. In Morzine, only the Atray chairlift is not running at the moment. The whole of Les Gets is open, as is Avoriaz. Despite the poor weather, the winds have not picked up significantly so all the higher, more exposed, lifts such as the Mossettes have remained open.
The school holidays will continue for another week, so the pistes could become busier. The temperature is set to stay very low but it looks as though there will be more sunshine throughout most of next week with some cloud but, hopefully not as much as there has been this week. There is also some significant snowfall forecast for the end of the week. Hopefully, this forecast will not change and there should be plenty of fresh snow by next weekend.
