March 19 - Tignes

Wednesday was a day to explore Tignes.  You may not have heard of this ski area but after you see the photographs of the place you'll be wondering why.  Tignes is contiguous with Val d'Isere and I think they share a lift or two.  The lift passes we bought were for Espace Killy, which included both Val and Tignes.  It was only slightly more expensive for this shared ticket.

So, here we go.  We awoke to yet another perfectly sunny, gorgeous spring morning.  We had a job to do - explore the vast terrain of Tignes.

After a couple chairlift rides, we came upon the Toviere promontory with this view:

With this much terrain to explore, we referred to the map early and often throughout the day.

In the morning, we wound our way to the far reaches of Tignes, to Aiguille Percee via the Marais chairlift.  I rode this seemingly innocuous lift to the Aiguille only to find out that Mark had been scared out of his wits on the ride up.  I guess it was a bit high in the air at some points but I hadn't noticed.

At the top of this lift, this arch came into view.  Very cool.

Here is the view of the ski area on the other side of the arch:

One of the reasons we came to this part of the mountain was because a hotel host told us about this long run on Tignes called Vallon de la Sache.  This run was incredibly long and passed through remote, rugged mountainscapes all the way down to a low village called Tignes Les Brevieres.  It was one of the most epic runs of my life with changing snow conditions on the way down due to temperature, aspect and elevation changes.  The lower half of the run was superb corn snow and I just couldn't stop.  There were a couple busy sections here and there but managed to snake by people by straightlining the edges of the run.  I don't know how many miles long the run was but it was about 4,000 vertical feet based on elevations shown on our trail map.

(as a side note, the vertical drop at Tignes is over 6,200 feet!!  It can't be done on a single run but you get the idea of how large the ski area is...)

After Vallon de la Sache, we rode the Sache gondola up to the Marais chairlift again (poor Mark).  Then, we skied down under the Aiguille Percee lift in perfect corn snow to get to the Merles lift.  From there we skied down to lunch at another fine restaurant at the base of the Grattalu lift.  Today, spaghetti bolognese was on tap for me with a nice local red wine.  Now this is living!!!

In the morning we were at the lowest point at Tignes so after lunch it only seemed fitting to try to get to the highest point of Tignes.  The lifts on La Grande Motte serve skiing on a glacier (and they do have summer skiing here) at a top elevation of 3,456 meters (11,338 feet; basically the same elevation as Big Sky's Lone Peak).  To get up there, we took yet another bizarre ski lift.  The Funiculaire Grande Motte flies beneath the mountain at incredible speeds and spits you out just below the final tram (yes, tram!) that goes to the summit.

Here are Tom and Mark enjoying this new lift (Mark especially seemed to revel in the lift as it was on the ground):

Unfortunately, the tram line was longer than 5 minutes and the skiing was probably not worth the wait so we opted to ski down instead.  We skied down a trail called Double M adjacent to the Les Lanches chairlift and rode the Fresse chairlift up to another section of Tignes, closer to Val d'Isere.

Here is a scenic view from the Fresse lift looking back down toward Val Claret base area (a part of Tignes):

Looking up, this was the view.  Near the very top we saw some skiers having fun on a nice steep pitch that was quite long and decided to head that way.  The terrain here was quite awe-inspiring.  We were wishing we'd had better off-piste snow conditions but skiers looked to be shredding this steep pitch nicely.

From the top of the Borsat lift, we climbed uphill 5 minutes or so to get to the steep pitch we had seen people skiing.  If felt good to be finally searching out some difficult slopes to challenge ourselves a bit.

After our little climb up, this was the view we had (below); it was taken from nearly the highest point in the photo above.  It just felt like we were on the top of the world up here.  I think we were all excited to ski the steep run.

I hiked up a tad higher than Mark, Tom and Jeff and here they are about to begin this great run:

The run dropped in nicely.  It was firm but edgeable packed snow.  Felt good to have to concentrate on the turns...

To end our day, we skied by La Folie Douce (which literally means "sheer madness" but loosely translated basically means "letting one's hair down") to see what was happening there.  It was way too packed to think about getting in to the party but it was a true spectacle to behold.  La Dolce Vita, le joie de vivre, whatever you want to call it... it's a really cool thing to witness this while on a ski hill.  I'm liking this European ski thing...

La Folie Douce

(with a decent background view too)

That evening we ate dinner at La Taverne d'Alsace restaurant in Val d'Isere.  It had a really nice atmosphere in the lower level of a building on the main drag.  The Alsatian food was quite good and we had a nice table for four right at the bar, a very cool setup.