Mont Chéry, FR 01/30/14

On Thursday, we got another overcast day with seriously flat light. Moreover, conditions at lower elevation on Morzine and Les Gets were getting a bit crunchy in spots, so pub owner Colin took the afternoon off to show me around Mont Chéry, which is right in the town of Les Gets, but not interconnected to the larger circuit. It's only a 5 to 10-minute walk across the village or a two-minute ride on the Petit Train to get there, but that small "inconvenience" keeps crowds to a minimum, even during peak periods:



Sorry Charlie, It's France -- no public transport during lunch:



With 2,100 verts and virtually no flats, Chéry has a beautifully consistent pitch. Other than a gondola to mid-mountain, all of the lifts are fixed-grip chairs or platter pulls. Many people from the other side of the pond (especially the Brits) get annoyed when their uphill transport isn't the high-speed variety, so that also helps keeps skier numbers down and conditions are noticeably better than on the other side of the valley:



Colin calls Chéry the "Burke Mountain of the Portes du Soleil" and it's a pretty accurate description, although I'd have to argue that it has more varied and steeper terrain (including a couple tempting but dangerous avy zones) than Burke. We went straight to the mountain's north side, where the snow was beautifully soft and chalky, a huge difference from across the village. Colin went tele for the day, on which he's as strong a skier as on an alpine set-up:







After a couple hours, we stopped for a quick lunch: a brie sandwich with hard cider from Brittany:



From the top of Mont Chéry's backside, you can see just across the valley the top of Flaine, i.e. Le Grand Massif, as well as another mountain that Colin claims to have the most snowfall of any ski area in the Alps: Praz de Lys (pronounced PRAH DE LEESE). It would be within the realm of possibility to throw up a lift between Mont Chéry and Praz de Lys; however, environmentalists have successfully fought an interconnect. When I return to the region, I'll definitely make a point of skiing there:

after a week of that..how do you come back and ski the cats..