Grimentz is another station in the Val D’Aniviers close to Zinal. The village is at 1600m and the skiing takes you up to 2853m on the Roc d’Orzival (above photo). Like Zinal this place is pretty small and the ski are is not huge.

Like Zinal though the skiing is incredible, the runs are steep and mostly black or red with great variations in pitch and terrain and the off-piste is endless. It was slighty busier than Zinal as it was Sunday but it was still possible to park in the tiny lift car park at 9:30 without any problem.

The snow’s just incredible at the moment, the low temperatures have kept it in excellent condition. On the downside it’s very, very cold around -13′c air temperature.

There’s a great red/black down the FIS course back into town which is a fantastic return and gives some great views over the valley.

Zinal is at the far end of the Val D’Anniviers in the Valais canton, it’s a small village with a small ski area of around 70km accessed by a telepherique from the valley floor. The telepherique takes you from 1670m up to 2440m and a couple of chairlifts take you on up to 2896m (above photo). The bulk of the ski area lies above 2440m.

The runs are mostly wide and fairly steep with some interesting variation in pitch and terrain which makes even the blue runs entertaining.

This is skiing the way it was meant to be, no crowds, no queues for the lifts and surrounded by serious mountains. We’d decided to stay the night but due to a parapente event all the hotels in Zinal were full so we headed for Grimentz which is just down the valley. We nearly ended coming home as the first two hotels we tried there were also full but just as we were driving out we found a small pension over a restaurant both of which turned out to be excellent.

There a small station near where I work that I managed to grab a couple of hours at. It’s best known locally as the station that Didier Cuche (Swiss Ski star) is from.

You can see how busy it was, what you can’t see is that it was -10′c at the bottom and a bit fresh.

Snow conditions were really excellent, there’s only 30km of piste but it was all in excellent condition and there was some great powder in the trees.

In fact, with the way conditions have been so far this season it’s about the best piste skiing I’ve had so far.

At last some serious snow is arriving !! In fact so serious that driving around is getting pretty awkward.

We were both fairly unimpressed by Nendaz, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much graffiti in Switzerland apart from in the major cities. The station isn’t really well laid out for skiing either leaving people needing to walk around too much. The quality of the skiing is very high of course and it’s linked to the4 Valleys and Verbier.

Still, we had loads of snow and were skiing in a meter of powder.