{"id":238,"date":"2009-10-17T00:05:43","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T23:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/?p=238"},"modified":"2013-07-04T00:01:20","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T23:01:20","slug":"les-deux-alpes-upside-ski-resort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/les-deux-alpes-upside-ski-resort\/","title":{"rendered":"Les Deux Alpes – the upside down ski resort"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"sno

sno mobile is above the ski lifts but no sno yet<\/p><\/div>\n

We all know how learning to ski or snowboard goes – you spend your first wobbly day or two of the ski holiday<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/a> within arms length of the cafes, on a nursery slope as steep as… well its almost completely flat. Then you progress a little further from the ski resort<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/strong> up the hill and find a slightly steeper bit called a green run.. and then a blue piste\u00a0to go a bit quicker… and so on until you’re taking ski lifts high up the mountain to the top ski lifts where the best snow and most extreme gradients (and rates of decent) are to be found.<\/p>\n

Not so\u00a0when skiing\u00a0Les 2 Alpes<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Often called\u00a0“the upside down ski resort”, Les Deux Alpes is so named because, unlike pretty much every other major ski resort in the world, 2 Alpes keeps its easiest and nursery slopes at the top of the mountain… and its fiendishly challenging stuff down at the bottom near town.<\/p>\n

This has two VERY important consequences:<\/p>\n

1. it is one of the best places to learn to ski and snowboard in the world<\/p>\n

2. it is one of the scariest places for a beginner to miss the last lift back down in the world<\/p>\n

Set your alarm for 15:30 and find a lift down!<\/p>\n

\"beginner

beginner slopes up on the glacier<\/p><\/div>\n

With the biggest skied glacier in Europe you can get plenty of\u00a0summer piste time in at Les 2 Alpes, but the highest area can be shut down in winter\u00a0if blizzards make it unsafe. <\/span>Les Deux Alpes<\/span><\/a><\/span> is <\/span>probably best known as the home of one of Europe’s if not the worlds top snow parks, which is moved up and rebuilt from its winter 2600m to 3200 for the summer season.\u00a0 Near the top, Les Deux Alpes is also linked to the legendary off piste of La Grave – only to be attempted with amountain guide<\/span>!<\/p>\n

You wouldn’t believe it if you’d walked and driven around with us, but Les 2 Alpes is also the second oldest ski resort in France (after Chamonix Mont Blanc<\/span><\/span><\/a>).\u00a0 A very dificult fact to\u00a0take in, as you navigate\u00a0this enormous and\u00a0modern looking\u00a0ski town.<\/p>\n

Arriving for a quick day of work there in early October, we probably couldn’t have picked a quieter time to visit, but we were still amazed by how utterly deserted it felt.<\/p>\n

Crossing from one empty street into a second, we were stopped by a\u00a0huge shaven-headed biker with black paint brush in hand.<\/p>\n

He turned out to be a a cracking chap from Paris, down to help his friend do up her bar, and\u00a0a huge fan of\u00a0vintage\u00a0Americana\u00a0– expressing his enthusiasm in much better English than my French, we couldn’t but\u00a0stop and invite the whole family in for a closer inspection.\u00a0 (sorry for not taking a picture, we\u00a0got carried away gassing about bikes & caravans in franglais)<\/p>\n

As fickle as I know it sounds, this one encounter completely changed my opinion of the place and its now at the top of the “must go back to” list for this season.\u00a0 As I used to say when making telly, its always about the people.<\/p>\n

\"having

having met only 1 business owner, will Les Deux Alpe “get” www.SNO.mobi ?<\/p><\/div>\n

We put our little post card into pretty much every business and accommodation letterbox we could find but met just one business owner in\u00a0this entire\u00a0ski resort – how useful is that going to be for getting SNO known in 2 Alpes?<\/p>\n

Would you believe that Les Deux Alpes has had one of the biggest responses and new business Listings created since we launched last season!<\/p>\n

snowboard Les Deux Alpes<\/span> skiing<\/span><\/span>: <\/span>Les 2 Alpes weather<\/span><\/a><\/span> | <\/span>les 2 alpes webcam<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span> |\u00a0 snowboard les 2 alpes<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

NEXT:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 La Grave<\/strong> – off piste mecca, but did you know the village was so beautiful, unspoiled and posh!<\/span><\/p>\n

(<\/span>add your La Grave business on the Get Listed page of our ski holidays<\/span><\/a> guide,<\/span> I\u2019ll\u00a0name-check\u00a0you in the next blog post)<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all know how learning to ski or snowboard goes – you spend your first wobbly day or two of the ski holiday within arms length of the cafes, on a nursery slope as steep as… well its almost completely flat. Then you progress a little further from the ski resort up the hill and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ski-holidays","has-post-title","no-post-date","has-post-category","no-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328,"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions\/328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sno.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}