There are two defining features of La Grave at the moment. The possibilities and the reality. The terrain potential here is of course legendary. The reality is that the snow at the moment is very unusual and unforgiving. After some warm days (when I was up in Chamonix) the temps cooled down refreezing things that had been soft and leaving cue ball like snow in many places up top.
On our first day Pelle, our guide and the owner of Skiers Lodge here wanted to take us down a south facing coulier. An unforecast strong wind played a bit of havoc up top. After going up both pulse gondolas (what a weird lift concept), we took a warm up lap on the upper poma which covers 400 m of vert. It is a very odd design that started life as 2 pomas in one with some odd mechanics. Now the first portion is unuseable since the glacier has retreated and they pull you up that pitch with what almost looks like a smart car on tracks. Anyway, after a short hike we headed right past the top of the upper lifts of Les Du Alpes - which were not running due to the wind. While you would think that with the steep vertical over here that the wind would drop off once decending... You would be wrong. The wind was howling down the first several thousand verts of our decent and was keeping the south face solidly frozen and or sastrugi (2-3 feet deep wind ridges at first).
After a seemingly endless series of falling leaf sideslips Pelle ended up changing his mind away from Larama to Olympic coulier. Olympic is a tight little chute with rock walls that shoot up on either side by hundreds of verts at times. It's probably only upper 30's in degrees of pitch and it had warmed nicely to corn and spring snow. Apparently it is rarely skiable. About half way down we had to go on belay to rappel down a short waterfall that was appearing. And then skied another short ice waterfall near the bottom. After several thousand verts of the nice snow in the coulier we popped out into the shadowed valley with rock hard snow for our 7 kilometer traverse. Foretunately there is enough snow still to ski all the way into St Christophe, a tiny little town perched on the side of a mountain. The single cafe was very busy from other skiers who had come down different routes on the back side. After finally getting lunch there we had to wait for a bus to drive us an hour back to La Grave. A one run day due to getting gear, ice side slipping, rappeling
. The snow is a mix of cue ball in spots, minor sastrugi on occasion, and some honest to goodness chalky snow. In fact more of the latter. Of course that only holds until a certain elevation where all aspects are simply refrozen ice and frequently bumps as you appraoch the P1 station. 
. Still interesting enough for a couple days so far, but getting a bit skunked on the surface conditions for the moment.
Here are some pics from our first day at LaGrave over the backside and eventually down Olympic Couloir.
