Les Deux Alpes: piste guide

Combine Les Deux Alpes main assets - guaranteed snow cover, long cruisy runs - with 222km of pistes served by 47 lifts, and you should have a near perfect resort.

But there’s a nagging feeling that something is wrong. It’s a big mountain with a top-to-bottom piste length of 8km, but midway through your first morning you’ll be asking yourself, "Where are all the other 214km?" It just doesn’t seem to add up – and it doesn’t.

The Schrahe report by a German cartographer on the extent of resort ski areas gives Les Deux Alpes a more modest 134km – and even that feels on the high side. Hopefully the resort will adjust the figure before its hotly anticipated alliance with Alpe d’Huez, between 2021 and 2023. An 18-pylon gondola between the resorts will create a giant three-resort area (Les Deux Alpes is already linked to La Grave) with three glaciers. When the gondola opens, Les Deux Alpes will be thrust into the upper echelons of world-class ski areas.

From Les Deux Alpes village, a choice of lifts gives main mountain access. The most important of these is the Jandri Express gondola that ascends all the way up to the foot of the glacier. From the outset it's important to realise that this is an unusually shaped mountain. Some of the most difficult runs are at the bottom, while the top is largely given over to easy blues.

This is good for beginners, who even during their first week on skis or board get to see (or even ski) much more terrain than in a conventional ski area. However, at the end of the day even wobbly intermediates are strongly advised to download rather than tackle the unusually steep valley runs that tend to be icy and overcrowded.

Intermediates will enjoy themselves here, although the pitch of many of the runs lacks challenge. For experts there's a wonderful remedy for this – hire a guide and then hike or snowcat off the shoulder of the glacier. From here you can explore the long and sometimes extremely demanding off-piste runs that lead from the 3,568m Dome de la Lauze down to the old climbing village of La Grave.

Les Deux Alpes is a friendly resort for snowboarders and for freestylers in general. It now has Les 2 Alpes Freestyle Land at 2,600m that includes the snowpark on the glacier with a half pipe and super pipe, and a family park.