Why THIS Is France’s Most Iconic Ski Area

Love your videos. When have you been there?

Did you ever make videos for all of the other Mountains in the breakdown table?

I couldn't find one for Veribier 4 Vallees. Possibly being edited?

This or Tignes/val d'isere? or some other? I want to go back to alps.

My rankings of the areas i went to

1. Le flegere
2. Le brevent
3. Les grands montets
4. Le tour
5. Les houches

I really like Mene ze pu pah.

As I have said elsewhere, these reviews are done with an incredibly American bias and based on a complete misunderstanding of skiing in the Alps. Good example: measuring "piste to piste" acres (here supposedly in the 100s), which then leads to a comparison of skiable acres at US resorts (in the multiple 1,000s for the larger US resorts). Problem is: the US resorts acres of course includes tons of ungroomed but inbounds skiing. If you measure the acres of European resorts including not just the groomed pistes but all the backcountry / sidecountry near the pistes, you'll understand that large European resorts are multiples of the size of their US counterparts… Anyone standing in Chamonix at 3000 ft and looking up to Mont Blanc at 15,000 ft will realize that this area simply can't be compared to anything in the US! You can ski 8,000 vertical feet runs here! There is nothing like it in the US. Finally, PLEASE learn to pronounce basic names of the places that you review! It's just painful otherwise.

I guess I would agree with your analysis from a tourist average skier perspective. In fact unless you are a hard charging expert there's not a lot in Cham besides the views.
But for hardcore skiers and boarders it's a pilgrimage that must be made by all.
Hopefully they get the top tram running soon on the Grand Montets as that and the Augille De Midi are what make Chamonix truly special.

Chamonix is great for mountaineering and steep skiing, but for “regular”skiing, I much prefer Verbier.

Love these videos, but volunteering to speak French on all future videos.

I wouldn't call Chamonix quintessential (quintessential means typical, which Chamonix certainly isn't), it's quite a unique place tbh and is a very different experience to most European resorts.

I would describe Cham as the holy grail of off piste skiing, and the 3 valleys as the holy grail of piste skiing. Espace Killy (Val d'Isere and Tignes) is the perfect mix of the two imo and is my favourite resort in the world.

Chamonix has some amazing off piste runs, but it's pretty crap if you want pisted skiing and/or don't want to have the bother of hiring a guide and carrying avi gear. There aren't much pisted runs, it's all broken up, and the pistes aren't particularly interesting.

3V has the biggest selectionn of pistes, but it's very piste dense, so there's little area for off piste skiing, as most of the slopes which are skiable are already marked runs.

EK has many amazing pistes which Cham lacks, but it's much less piste dense than 3V (for context EK and 3V both cover roughly the same area, but EK has half the pistes), which means there are lots of unpisted areas left for off piste skiing while still within reach of the lifts, many of which are incredible.

Also leaving some or all blacks ungroomed is very common in France, but not in Austria, Switzerlad and Italy, where all pistes are groomed, including blacks. France uses a slightly different grading system to the rest of Europe, with a green category that the others lack. This means that French blues and reds tend to be harder than the same colours in other countries, and French blacks are harder than any marked runs in those countries, though Austria have their skiroutes and Switzerland has the orange itineraries which are eqivalent to the french blacks.

One other point is that "trail", "lodge"/"lodging" and "tram" are americanisms, if you use those here many people will just give you a confused look or ask you what you mean, we generally say piste/run instead of "trail", cable car instead of "tram" and accomodation insead of "lodging". Obviously you could also use the local language if you speak it.

I was there for 9 days in Jan. 2018 and had a fantastic time. I was lucky enough to know someone that lived there who made a really good guide. We spent two days at Grand Montet, which is truly majestic and pretty spicy in certain areas. The first couple days I was skiing with colleagues after a decent storm and we did Brevant the first day, then we hired guides to take us into the backcountry behind LaTour (amazing and mostly untracked) and the next day the Valle Blanche, which should be on any serious skier's bucket list. Visibility was crap that day, but the views were still jaw dropping and the crampon ridge traverse redefined the term 'pucker' for me. Bottomless drop on both sides. Yikes. We took some beginner Dutch friends to Les Houche one day too and had fun skiing and day drinking. 😁 The town is awesome. We spent a couple of nights hanging out at Maison des Artiste, which is both a nightclub and a recording studio. Bands come and record during the day, then perform at night, and while we were there a very cool Brazilian band was staying all week – we danced what was left of our legs off!

peak rankings dropped, hell yes 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 more France, gentlemen!

You will never find a ski region in Europe that has the same amount and quality of snow as in North America. There's just too much continent between the ocean and the Alps… Not sure how fair it is to use North America as the baseline in this regard.

These kooks always find my recommendations:(