There’s a small village called St Nicholas which is situated on the slopes of the valley leading to Les Contamines. This valley is a dead end to traffic, though not to walkers as the Romans passed though this way on their way over the Alps, allegedly. Anyway, it being a dead end, and not being on any sort of main road, St Nicholas enjoys the fact that there’s no real reason to expand or to build big hotels so it’s remained a lovely traditional Savoie village.

It does have a small number of pistes and lifts but, unlike Cordon which is totally isolated as a ski area, it is linked very well into the huge ski area of St Gervais/Megeve. But the route to it from that area is pretty tucked away which means that it does stay very quiet. Fantastic. One great feature of St Nicholas is also its skiing dowfall. It’s south facing. This means that it loses the snow on it’s south-facing slopes (it has some slopes facing other directions) pretty early on in the season. Still, it has invested in some snow cannons so it does its best to keep up with its bigger neighbours.

The day we went was gorgeous. The snow was great and there was plenty of it so we could ski right down to the village. Once there, you take off your skis and walk 50 metres or so along the road to an old chairlift to take you back up again. Strangely, a lift operator takes your skis from you as you go through the ticket barrier and puts them into a box on the back of a chair. He then puts the other skis in the next chair which you then sit on at the same time. When you’re used to skiing onto a chairlift and skiing off it at the top, it’s very disconcerting being on one without skis knowing that yours are either on the back of the chair in front of you, or on the back of the one you’re on. When you get to the top, another man takes your skis off the chair and stands them up for you while you attempt to stand and run very quickly to the side and out of the way of the chair (which doesn’t stop at any time in this whole process, unless you’re unlucky enough to take a tumble). I’ve never seen a chairlift like this before.