I left the house heading for Gstaad and was intending to park at Rougemont so it was surprising to find myself at Leysin in some ways.I’d recalled that the company I used to work at in Germany had their ski weekend to Leysin so I thought I’d decided on route to pop over and see if anyone I knew was around.

Leysin’s a pretty small place so I was surprised not to actually see anyone I knew although it was pretty cold and I maybe should have made a more vigorous search of the bars and restaurants.

They’re pretty well organized over at Leysin you can park on the outside of the village and get a free bus to the lift, if you want to park next to the lift you have to pay which I thinks a good idea.

Conditions are still very good, it’s a bit hard packed in places but I’d put a fresh edge onto my Zags before leaving this morning so, although they’re not the ideal ski for hard pack, they were handling pretty nicely.

It’s still very cold so by 4:30pm I have to say I’d had enough, it was just too cold on the chairlifts to be comfortable.

I went home over the Col des Mosses rather than hit the traffic at Glion coming from the Valais/Verber direction, as it was snowing heavily this was a bit exciting and I was sliding around in the car a bit, even back down round Chateux d’Oex and through to Bulle was pretty wild and it didn’t ease much on the autoroute round Lac Gruyere.

This was the first visit to our apartment in Morillon for a month or so; we try to avoid the area during peak times if at all possible. The roads were still busy even on Friday evening though, the French now seem to leave Friday night and drive through the night to avoid the rush on the the Saturday.It’s been pretty cold recently so the snow in the Grand Massif is in quite excellent condition with packed snow on the pistes. Any easily accessible off-piste if totally tracked out through, it’s less genuine volume of traffic but more people traversing for hundreds of meters before falling over and repeating in the opposite direction.

We skied over to Flaine in the morning where most of the terrain seems to be open, in fact cover is quite good and it’s possible to ski between the pistes in reasonable safety.

There’s so little you can say about the architecture that’s not already been said From just above the station things do improve a little of course :

We then headed back towards Les Carroz for some lunch at the Bois de la Char, it’s always good in there, the food is always good, it’s not haute cuisine but the service is good and it’s always nice to go.

After the lunch the light was fantastic, in fact it really was the perfect February ski day, cold, clear skies and great snow. The only downside is that the numbers of people on the slopes not in control seems to be steadily increasing to the point where you spend most of the day just avoiding collisions. It must have been horrific during the week when the crowds were there.

I left the house heading for La Berra the nearest ski station to home but on reaching the the junction to Schwarzsee I decided to go there, it only 45mins away but, in true Swiss style, far enough away that they speak another language (German, in case you’re wondering).

It’s so cold at the moment, I know everyone in the UK is under the impression its a “dry cold” but it’s not, it was -20′c when I arrived and that’s cold. Taking the shoes off to put ski boots on just drains heat from your feet.

Anyway, as the photo shows, the snow’s great still, there’s still plenty of fresh powder and the piste if good packed snow.

The pistes are just great, there’s some good steep slopes you can carve fast on, or, as fast as I can with my Zags.

It’s better to take the Zags where they belong which is powder of course. There’s a line down through the the meadows back to the car-park which is quite good fun.

My tracks go a little wide there when I realized I was coming up fast on those fence posts