“What Weather Is It?” - Megève, France Joins Ikon Pass

Can we fix how American ski passes talk about EuroSki before we fall into a collective crevasse?

What name is it?

I’m not saying that Americans don’t make certain things as confusing as possible. Visiting Euros tend to be baffled by sales tax (added after purchase), tipping (added by discretion but culturally mandatory), and requests for ID when ordering alcohol in a restaurant (in Europe, you can buy beer out of a vending machine). But we do make some things very easy to understand. For example: skiing. This ski pass gets you on the lifts at this ski area that is called by this name and this name only. For example: the Ikon Pass accesses Jackson Hole, a ski area that is always and only known as “Jackson Hole” (nicknames such as “Jackson Bro” notwithstanding).

Not so in Europe, where each ski area appears to have a minimum of 15 names, an ever-shuffling mishmash derivative of the towns and peaks surrounding the ski lifts, layered beneath undefined regional allegiances forged into “domaines” and “safaris.” It doesn’t help that so many ski areas sit along the crest of the Alps, where French, Swiss, Italian, German, and Austrian borders collide with their various languages, each of which then must be translated to English, not just for us dumb U.S. Americans, but because traveling Euros all speak English to each other too.

Some ski areas are more complex than others. For example, Megève, France, the ninth – and latest, as of a couple weeks ago – European “ski area” to join Ikon Pass. I know I’m in trouble when even the Euros are confused. Here’s Powder Hounds, the most reliable EuroSite I’m aware of, attempting to explain Megève:

Megeve’s ski area is a vast, tangled mass of lift, piste & pass interlinked confusion with neighbouring resorts including St Gervais, St Nicolas, & Jaillet-Combloux.

The rest of the paragraph somewhat softens this by saying, more or less, that “actually it doesn’t matter because it’s all one big ski area anyway”:

Thankfully, most skiers & snowboarders will remain blissfully ignorant of the ski resort boundaries due to the seamless & all-inclusive nature of the local Evasion Mont Blanc ski lift pass. The pass is excellent value & covers a massive 445km of ski trails and over 1,500m of skiable vertical - how typically French.

Unfortunately, we are not dealing with the Évasion Mont Blanc ski lift pass. We are dealing with the Ikon Pass. This, according to Ikon Pass’ Megève landing page, means “400 km of connected terrain across Rochebrune, Mont d’Arbois, Jaillet, and Côte 2000.” Which is just a small part of the trailmap shown on Ikon’s Megève map page, which is essentially this:

I checked in with Ikon Pass officials, who assured me that, yes, your Ikon Pass will get you through that whole mess of lifts. Also, Megève’s Ikon Pass landing page states that Ikon Pass holders who find one of the ski area’s ticket offices and “specify the number of days they wish to ski” will be provided with a lift ticket that “guarantees” access to all 400 kilometers of slopes across the Évasion Mont Blanc resort, which includes “eight peaks facing Mont Blanc.”

[Mont-Blanc, I should note, is the tallest mountain in Western Europe, and rises 4,810 European Feet (locally referred to as “meters”), equal to 15,781 American Feet. For context, the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States is 14,494-foot Mount Whitney, California (six Alaskan mountains rise higher than Mont-Blanc, including 20,310-foot Mount McKinley/Denali, the tallest in North America).]

So it looks as though what Ikon Pass provides access to – or claims to provide access to – is Évasion Mont Blanc, a monster ski resort of which Megève is one of perhaps seven ski areas. Here’s a simplified version of the trailmap above, with the Évasion ski areas within the dotted perimeter:

Powderhounds – and most other sources – tend to combine these seven marked zones (Megeve, Jaillet-Combloux, La Giettaz, Saint Gervais Mont-Blanc, St. Nicolas, Les Contamines, Hauteluce) into three main ski areas: Saint Gervais or Megève, which includes the areas marked as Saint Gervais, Saint Nicolas de Veroce, and Megève; Portes du Mont-Blanc, which includes Combloux, Le Jaillet, and La Giettaz; and Les Contamines Montjoie, which includes Contamines and Hauteluce.

Seventeen days after Ikon made this announcement, that’s the best I can do with about 40 hours of playing detective from a computer screen across the ocean. So don’t blame me if your Ikon Pass doesn’t work. Or if Megève’s ticket offices are in the basement of a boulangerie. Or if they don’t exist at all (Ikon’s website says Megève is direct to lift, but Ikon officials told me it is not). Or if the French are on their nine-hour lunch break when you stop in. Or if the ticket clerk looks at your Ikon Pass like it’s a handwritten backrub coupon that your spouse presented for your anniversary. Or if you get on the wrong lift and end up in Italy.

To further confuse things, Megève is also available on Mountain Collective, as well as a variety of local multi-area passes, all of which, unlike Ikon and MC, are still for sale.

For the past five years, I’ve been largely dismissive with these EuroPassAdds, saying some version of “this is big and confusing and I don’t quite get it but I’m sure it’s great just keep in mind the Euros love groomers and you have to be careful not to ski into a crevasse.” But with at least 45 ski resorts across 15 European countries now on American multimountain ski passes, it’s becoming clear that I need to develop - and deliver - a more complete understanding of EuroSki. Especially since the multimountain passes themselves are largely failing at presenting these sprawling ski resorts in a coherent framework.

So let’s start with Megève.