J2Ski Holiday 11th January 2015 Sauze d'Oulx

Here's a nice one of Bald-Eagleman (Piste Paul's photo).
I think it's coming back from Sestriere on Saturday.

Been meaning to reply on this thread for a few days:

Well done AllyG for organsisng what seems to have unanimously gone down as a great trip - I know how hard it used to be to organise the lads trip for half your numbers and that was with people who all knew each other (and their foibles) so could have a few more arbitary decisions made ;-)

Like a few others on here I'm sadly not that surprised by the conditions - the Milky Way is a great choice but is prone to this lack of snow. I went about 12-14 years ago and we had hardly anything open in first week of February - they had actually refused to do beginners boarding classes as they were averaging one collarbone break per group on the ice and so the schools shut it down

Your trip to Orelle looks to have been a real day out - I love the "4th valley" though have never tackled it from the very bottom cable car station - only ever over the top from VT. I agree that the piste side stuff in VT can be a bit naughty but thought the hut in the 4th Valley itself was reasonable last year. To be fair though we don't eat in mountain restaurants very often (prefer to keep skiing) so have never subscribed to the "France is expensive" thing as the chalets with free wine are very reasonable and the lift pass - though high priced is far better value in terms of pounds per piste/mile/lifts than most.

Its the age old issue of confusing price with value that I see in my real job all the time. Frankly if people can't/won't see the difference between the two then I simply move on as its not worth wasting time. I'd also be interested to hear the thoughts of people in the group about lift queues. As this wasn't a holiday week I expect they were few and far between in VT - despite some peeps on here saying that you "always get huge queues in France mega resorts". The fact that some of your group went to Courchevel and back in the day puts immediate lie to that one......

Some of the photography has been excellent (we'll quickly gloss over your tendency for a rest on piste - and your skiing in Jeans as a youngster). I remember Sauze being really pretty just wishing there was more snow

Glad you all enjoyed it and look forward to hearing of next year's plan

Andyoneil,
The only fairly large queue I saw in VT during our day out was for the big cable car up to the junction between VT and Meribel, where they only let so many through at once to join the final queue, like for the funicular up to the Grand Motte in Tignes.

And even here I don't suppose we had to wait for more than about 5 minutes. The other lifts were pretty much straight on.

There was also, apparently, a queue at the end of the day for the gondola down to the car park in Orelle. It was supposed to close at 4-30 p.m. but I think it kept going for a short while after that to clear the queue.

And as for the problem with the lack of snow in Sauze and the links being closed for the first couple of days, well, each group holiday we seem to have had some extreme weather conditions! And each time we could have decided it was too cold/foggy/icy to ski but we were there to ski/board so we went out and made the best of the conditions.

The first J2Ski group holiday, to Tignes, there was plenty of snow and the slopes were uncrowded, but for a lot of the time the light was very bad so we couldn't see properly (even with goggles), and it was incredibly cold! As far as I remember it went down to minus 28C (with wind chill) at one point :shock:
And one of the group got frostbite in her toes! :(
And someone else had part of their beard snap off! :shock:

I thought I'd better not post up a photo of her black toe-nails in case I upset anyone, but I think you can see from this photo of me ready to go up the Sache gondola in the morning (where it wasn't so cold as up the top) how cold it was!

Tignes 13th - 20th January 2013


And then last year when we went to Folgarida there was an incredible amount of snow, a record for the area I think, but it was also really foggy for nearly the entire week, so we could hardly see where we were ski-ing/boarding :(

Folgarida 2nd to 9th Feb 2014:


And during the holiday we've just had, it was lovely and sunny for most of the week (so we could see where we were going!) but for the first couple of days we were confined to a limited area with icy pistes.
However, later on it snowed quite a bit, as you can see from Piste Paul's photo of the off-piste skiers, taken from the chairlift.
Sauze 11th to 18th January 2015:

AllyG wrote:Andyoneil,
The only fairly large queue I saw in VT during our day out was for the big cable car up to the junction between VT and Meribel, where they only let so many through at once to join the final queue, like for the funicular up to the Grand Motte in Tignes.

I know the one Ally - that can be annoying as it doesn't open first thing so I've been up there and ended up coming back down to Village and do another run up before it opens to avoid getting cold

There are other ways over though of course - down towards Les Men and you can go over at various points

Really glad you all had a good time - I'm off to VDI in 8 days and the amount of snow there is already excellent with more falling (as per the reports and the webcams that I'm watching non-stop). Hopefully it'll come down for the next 5 days or so then bluebirds when we get there - here's hoping...

andyoneil wrote: I'm off to VDI in 8 days and the amount of snow there is already excellent with more falling (as per the reports and the webcams that I'm watching non-stop). Hopefully it'll come down for the next 5 days or so then bluebirds when we get there - here's hoping...

I hope you have a great time, with plenty of snow and sunshine during the day :)

It's amazing the difference a foot of snow and some cold temperatures made to Sauze whilst we were there. You can see this very clearly looking at Piste Paul's excellent photos.

This is what the bottom of the Clotes piste looked like on Tuesday. I have to say I was kind of fascinated with looking at how bad it was - sort of like looking at a natural disaster!




And this is what it looked like on Saturday:

One of the hired car group (a J2Skier friend), who went to Orelle on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, used the phone app 'ski tracks' to record how far and fast he went. This is what he did on Tuesday. As you can see his maximum speed was 58 mph doing 11 complete downhill runs, he skied 24 miles, and he went up 21 miles of lift - and all in 6 hours with a short break for lunch :)




Some of the car group on Wednesday. Apparently the boarder Ade73 is sitting down because he had to wait for ages for the skiers to catch up with him, as they were struggling in the powder! (Their photo).

Here's a photo of all 28 of us at supper in the Sauze hotel. (The photo is Felthorpe's taken by Alessandra who is one of the very helpful staff)



I don't know what Ian's laughing about - I was at the other end of the table so I couldn't hear!

Here are a couple of photos of the Sauze bar and the seating area next to it. They're management photos taken from Trip Advisor.





There was also a huge separate sitting area but most people in the group stayed by the bar.

http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_Review-g194891-d3301609-Reviews-Hotel_Sauze-Sauze_d_Oulx_Province_of_Turin_Piedmont.html#photos