Laurent Vaucher the CEO of TeleVerbier has announced its COVID protection policy for the current winter, in line with may European resorts especially Austria. It come in 3 separate points:

1. Clean and Safe

TeleVerbier have obtained the ‘Clean and Safe’ label from Swiss Tourism. This means that are following the industry specific guidelines to make sure sanitisation and social distancing is followed.

2. Restriction free operations

Cableways are classified as public transport so follows the same regulations and buses and trains. This means that currently there is no lift/skier capacity restrictions but you will need to wear a mask in lifts and queues. It is not known yet if buffs or other types of face coverings are acceptable. This situations is caveated by any new measures or restrictions imposed by the governments. Let’s hope it doesn’t change. Click here for more information.

3. Lift pass reimbursement due to COVID restrictions

There will be a pro-rata reimbursement of your pass in the case of new government-imposed isolating measures, such as a quarantine, confinement, resort closure, etc. Click here for more information

 

 

 

New Ski lift in Veysonnaz – Piste de L’Ours new 8 man gondola

We are all very excited to hear that TeleVerbier are to upgrade the old 4 man chair in La Chaux to a shiny new fast 6 man, as reported recently on Verbier.com. This will indeed make a difference to those who have outgrown Les Esserts and want a fat lunch in Le Dahu.

But the real game changer is happening over in the 3rd Valley, Veysonnaz. A couple of years go TeleThyon upgraded the old gondola from Veysonnaz town to Thyon. Not only did it reduce the time by about 7 minutes, the wonders of automatic doors meant that you no longer needed a lift assistant to lock you into the tin can and another to release you at the top..!

This year it the turn of the Piste de L’Ours. Described by a French downhill skier as ‘the most beautiful piste in the world’ the Bear piste is a steep, long and undulating piste lined by trees. It is the scene of many FIS World Cup downhill competitions over the years. Although the lift used to be the fastest in Europe in 1981, it certainly isn’t now with a bottom to top time in excess of 15 minutes. The new Piste de L’Ours gondola will halve the time which means you will have time to do at least 2 thigh burning runs of the FIS downhill before a well earned lunch at the Le Bois Sauvage in Les Masses.

 

Yes, this winter has started with a bang and on only the second weekend of the year Verbier can boast lifts open down to mid-station and enough snow for people to be skiing into resort and even putting tracks down the Attelas Couloirs and Creblet.

Now, we certainly wouldn’t recommend that as we know how upsetting a big hole in the bottom of your ski is when you inevitably run out of snow and hit a few rocks. But that said, we’ve all done it…

The snow up top was really good – Sophie said it was “chalky”. Which is good enough for me – especially when you bear in mind some years we haven’t even got Lac des Vaux open. And the next step in the annual guessing game is when will they start opening the lifts all week and not just at weekends?

As well as the Lac des Vaux lift running the Tortin bubble also fired up so that people over in Nendaz and Siviez could enjoy the cracking early season snow. We also have new restaurant news – well quite a lot of that another time actually – but first up is that the Olympique self-service restaurant has had a proper make-over and is actually quite nice. Have a look at the gallery and there’s a snap in the gallery somewhere.

In fact, everything seems to be ticking along nicely…

The great news is that TeleVerbier has announced the opening dates for the lifts and the plan is to open the Lac des Vaux runs and possibly Attelas to Ruinettes at the weekends from the 9th of November. Which is a week on Saturday. I know, good isn’t it?

Open until May. Even better, eh?

In addition the claim is that from the 30th November it’ll be open during the week as well. Significantly they are hoping to open until May 4th this season – a week later than usual.

 

Mont Fort, Savoleyres and Bruson

Mont Fort is theoretically opening from the 30th November too, with Savoleyres scheduled for the 14th December and the shiny new Bruson lift will open up Bruson from 21st December through to the 21st April – stop me if I’m wrong that’s a week or two later than normal isn’t it? Finally the beginners lift in town is scheduled to open on the 14th.

 

Assuming the weather plays ball.

Now don’t forget that the big factor here is the weather – and Verbier normally opens up the first week of November a the weekends. So the real race is to see if it opens that first weekend, and then how long before week long opening and the pistes from Attelas to Ruinettes opening. If the weather’s good it’ll be sooner rather than later.

Now for some shameless plugging.

As always, there is only one place to keep your eyes on this. Here.

So keep an eye on the blog and don’t forget we’re on Twitter, Facebook and even Instagram – so you can keep up to date there. We’ll be posting photos of anything to do with Verbier constantly, so you’ll be missing out if you don’t…

 

 

Even with the miserable weather we have been experiencing over the past month they are continuing with the Bruson lift installation. Certainly no arguing whether it is going to happen now!