It was to be a trip down memory lane - my first visit to Les Trois Vallées in 20 years and, to add a little spice, I avoided that most British of French ski villages, Méribel, in favour of Val Thorens, which, at 2,300m, can still bill itself proudly as "the highest ski village in Europe".
Twenty years ago, I went with a few friends and we suffered an endless coach journey from Geneva airport and stayed in a warm and matey Mark Warner chalet. This time, I drove from Geneva on my own and on a Friday instead of the ghastly Saturday changeover day. I was a little apprehensive as all I had been able to book at the last minute was a small apartment in a hotel that had been savaged on the Expedia website.
The drive was uneventful although I couldn't resist sticking my tongue out at the soul-less restaurant between Annecy and Ugine where all the coaches used to make a pit stop. Maybe they still do. It's still dreary and I was pleased that the huge, dusty parking lot was empty.
Twenty years ago, Les Trois Vallées was already pretty industrialised but still vaguely charming. Today, it has reached Japanese levels of overcrowding. The unmistakeable signal is that towards the end of a hard day's skiing and boarding, the snow on heavily travelled pistes, particularly areas around lift terminals, simply wears out. It takes on the consistency of dust and gathers in shapeless mounds. These are, ironically, quite useful to break your speed over the rest of the ground, which has been packed and scraped down to treacherous ice or near-ice.
At Val Thorens 20 years ago, the village had a bleak, concrete bunker feel and there were only a couple of small lifts and one big cable car to take you up to the breathtaking Cime de Caron. Today, it's a big town and there are double loading six-seater detachable chair lifts and massive gondolas whisking hundreds of people per hour up new valleys.
My mini-apartment turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I feared - and the connections from room to ski locker to piste were typically efficient. From my window at night, I could look straight up to the massive wall of the Aiguille de Péclet, dominating the town from a height of 3,400m. But I might have enjoyed it more if it weren't artificially lit. And to the right in the distance was a bright red, neon-lit X over a restaurant with a vast sun terrace. It turned out to be a sign in the shape of a knife and fork, as if one needed reminding.
It is, of course, unfair to sneer at the factory-like scale. For one thing, it has significant advantages. A proliferation of ski shops means you can hire your kit very quickly so that you can get on to the piste in a hurry. After all, that's what you are there for. And huge lift capacity means a lot of piste time. On the Saturday (admittedly less crowded because it is changeover day), I spun around all three big valleys and had clocked up more than 8,000 vertical metres by 3pm, simply because I never waited more than 30 seconds for a lift and was able to refuelat midday in a fast-service cafeteria.
The terrain of Les Trois Vallées is as good as any I have ever seen for skiing and boarding and, when conditions are good, the area can provide a lot of people with a lot of pleasure. But you do have many moments when you feel you are part of a huge processing system. Even the mountains end up looking and feeling as if they were purpose-built.
www.les3vallees.com
