Les Deux Alpes

Ski passes at the larger French resorts are very expensive. It costs €56 per day to ski in Alpe D’Huez but fortunately if you are in resort for more than a week there is a season pass available which is much cheaper. We bought our season passes for €745 including medical insurance for the equivalent of 13 days skiing.

The bonus of buying any pass that is one week or longer in Alpe D’Huez is that you also get a number of days in other ski areas included in the cost. One of these is the nearby report of Les Deux Alpes, which can be seen from some of the Alpe D’Huez slopes.

The town of Les Deux Alpes is sprawling and busy and it is difficult to park so I wasn’t keen on trying to drive up there. However, just like Alpe D’Huez, there are lifts in the valley which directly access the resort. At the bottom end of the village of Venosc is a lift called simply Telecabine de Venosc, with a car park alongside it. The slight disadvantage with this lift is that it arrives in the bottom end of town and the connecting ski lifts are a few hundred metres walk away.

However, once you reach the lifts (the closest being the new Diable lift), it is a very quick ride up the mountain. This is a high resort with the top at 3600m and the town at 1650m. Les Deux Alpes is an unusual resort in that the very top of the mountain, the glacier, has pretty gentle slopes which make up a great beginner area. The more intermediate and advanced skiing is in the middle and then the way back to town is either a wide sweeping blue run or a gnarly steep black run. There are 15 greens, 41 blues, 13 reds and 9 black runs over 119km of slopes. So overall it is a smaller resort than Alpe D’Huez and more geared to the early, intermediate skier.

The lift system in Les Deux Alpes seem to be more modern with fast chairlifts in more places and the lifts seem less prone to queues than in Alpe d’Huez. The ski runs also tend to be much wider than in Alpe d’Huez and there are lots of really cruisy runs making it really suitable for those intermediate skiers.

The mountain itself is made up of different sectors which are either linked by lift or by fairly level ski runs so it takes a bit of time to learn your way around. It is possible to ski all the way from the top at 3600m down to the town without using a lift and the run is just over 12km long with almost 2000m of vertical drop.

The views from Les Deux Alpes are spectacular and from the top it’s possible to see all the way to Mont Blanc and over back towards Alpe d’Huez. Going right to the top of the resort is a bit of a chore though with the final T-Bar lift only accessible after a bit of a trek over flat ground and the same on the way back. This is hard work at over 3000m.

There has been talk for a number of years of a lift linking Alpe d’Huez and Les Deux Alpes but the construction was delayed by Covid and there is no go live date currently fixed.