Travel: Skiing / Top 20 Resorts: Val Thorens

I LEARNT to appreciate what good snow can do for a chap's skiing in Val Thorens. Imagine: you are a third- year skier staying in Meribel, struggling on pistes that alternate between morning ice and afternoon slush. Your tour guide persuades you, against your better judgement, to make the trek (as it then was, before the Plattieres gondola) via Les Menuires to Val Thorens. You are rewarded with the best half-day's skiing of your short skiing life. You may not have been hooked before, but you sure are now.

At 2,300m, Val Thorens is Europe's highest resort; its slopes go up to various points around the 3,200m mark; some face west or even south, but the best face north. It would be surprising if these slopes did not offer good snow, and they do. The setting is treeless, of course, and the resort is all- new. But it has a vaguely village-like structure and offers skiing from the door, and the better hotels and sports facilities are smarter than the norm for a serious skier's resort.

CHRIS GILL'S VERDICT: You could not call Val Thorens a complete winter resort. It is about skiing, and specifically about snow. But it is a less depressing place than some of its high- altitude rivals. And for a reminder of what trees look like, you can easily ski to Courchevel for lunch.

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