From air traffic control strikes to extreme weather, last year saw millions of passengers face flight delays across Europe.
02.01.2024 - 10:03 / nationalgeographic.com
Who’s the Wizard of Oz? As far as parents in our group are concerned, his name is Pierre Paret-Solet — a locally born ski instructor who can wrangle frozen boot bindings with the flick of a wrist, scoop up myriad lost poles while skiing backwards and cajole wilful children without remotely raising his voice. And if, say, just as you sit down to lunch a snowboard happens to shoot off the side of a slope because the kids were using it as a sledge, he can retrieve it before your tartiflette hits the table. And all with a genuine smile.
Welcome to Oz. Constructed in the 1980s, Oz-en-Oisans — or Oz 3300 to use its more modern moniker — is a little ski village in France’s Isère region. An hour by road from Grenoble (two from Lyon), Oz is one of the most recent resorts to be built in the French Alps but, despite this, has the air of a traditional wooden chalet hamlet — a diminutive cluster of traditional Alpine buildings set around two ski lifts. It’s a place so bijou, you could veer off the nursery slopes on a sledge and pretty much slide straight into your accommodation. A log cabin is the hub for kit hire and the ESF (Ecole du Ski Français) ski school, where instructors seem to possess Pierre’s child-inspiring charm, beyond which, a mini strip of bar-cafes and a grocery shop are backed by snowy peaks and a modest collection of low-rise apartments.
Unlike the fictitious kingdom, Oz delivers on its simple promise, of being a manageable family-friendly ski resort. But like any good wizard, it has something up its sleeve. Beyond the 30 local ski runs, via short gondola ride, Oz links with the vast Alpe d’Huez Grand Domaine ski region: a string of five ski resorts and two villages, including the buzzy, year-round mountain town of Alpe d’Huez itself, all-in totalling 155 miles of piste.
What that means — a boon for mixed ability groups — is that you can divide and conquer with ease. Beginners and rusty intermediates can enjoy the nursery slopes and pretty green and blue runs among the trees around Oz and its neighbouring hamlet, Vaujany, while the gung ho can gondola up to Pic Blanc, the region’s 3,330m summit, to tackle what’s dubbed the world’s longest black run, La Sarenne. This half-hour, 10-mile downhill drops some 2,000m from Pic Blanc’s glacial heights through deep gorges to below the tree line, beginning with a steep mogul field and — a bragging rights variant — a near vertical drop into the piste from the end of Le Tunnel.
It’s battle tales of this mountain passage that the teens in our group bring to the table at La Grange. The classic mountain hut restaurant with a sun-trap terrace is an easily located lunch spot near the Alpette lift, the gondola connecting Oz with the wider ski area. Over
From air traffic control strikes to extreme weather, last year saw millions of passengers face flight delays across Europe.
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