Massif des Aravis

The Massif des Aravis sits above Annecy in the Haute-Savoie, a short run up from Geneva. It is marketed as one area but skis as separate resorts on a shared pass. La Clusaz is the biggest, its slopes spread across several sectors that also take in the smaller Manigod side at Croix-Fry and Merdassier — those two are genuinely lift-linked, around 125 km of piste between them. Le Grand-Bornand is the other half of the name, over the low Saint-Jean-de-Sixt col in its own valley, with about 90 km of its own; you reach it by a free ski bus, not on skis. Add them up and the Aravis pass covers around 220 km across the massif, most of it between roughly 1000 m and 2500 m. These are working Savoyard villages first and ski resorts second — Reblochon country, tree-lined and traditional, with the honest catch that they sit low and west, and feel it in a warm spell.

The character, and how close it is. This is the traditional Haute-Savoie a lot of people picture and few of the big linked domains still deliver — timber chalets, cheese farms, real villages that were here long before the lifts. La Clusaz gives a proper mid-size ski area with a genuinely good high sector, Le Grand-Bornand adds family slopes and some of France's best cross-country and biathlon terrain, and the whole thing is about an hour from a major airport. You come for authenticity and access, not for the biggest lift-linked map in the Alps.

Mostly middling altitude and plenty of trees, which sets the mood. The skiing runs over rounded, wooded ridges with the jagged Aravis limestone wall as a backdrop, so you spend a lot of the day among pines rather than on open glacier bowls. La Clusaz's Balme sector is the exception — higher, north-facing and more serious, where the area keeps its best snow and its steeper lines. Elsewhere it skis as a cruising, intermediate-and-family area with a strong beginner base. The tree cover is a real asset when cloud sits on the tops or light goes flat, which it does here.