218 Days on the Snow: Les 2 Alpes Marks 80 Years by Betting Big on Its Glacier

High in the Oisans massif, where a plateau at 1,650 metres has drawn skiers since the years just after the Second World War, Les 2 Alpes is preparing to celebrate a milestone birthday the way it has always defined itself: through altitude, endurance, and sheer length of season. As the resort turns 80 this winter, its 2026-27 press pack lays out a season built almost entirely around one idea — that this is a mountain that simply doesn't stop.

A season stretching into July

Les 2 Alpes will open its ski area on Saturday, November 28, 2026, and won't fully close until Sunday, July 4, 2027 — 218 days of skiing in total, one of the longest seasons anywhere in the Alps. The winter season proper runs from opening day through Sunday, May 2, 2027, covering a vertical ski area stretching from 3,600 metres down to 1,300 metres. But it's what happens after the traditional season ends that sets the resort apart: from May 3 to July 4, skiers and snowboarders can still ride the high-altitude terrain between 3,600 and 2,600 metres — narrowing, come June, to the band between 3,600 and 3,200 metres — while lower down, visitors shift to biking, hiking, running, the swimming pool, the skate park, the pump track and padel courts.

That claim to near-perpetual skiing isn't just marketing. This past spring delivered what the resort is calling a record-breaking season: between May and July 2026, Les 2 Alpes logged 77,374 skier lift-pass scans (up 11% year-on-year), 12,956 pedestrian scans (up 17%) and 11,500 mountain-bike lift-pass scans. Exceptional snow cover — 2.5 metres on the ground into late May — allowed the glacier to stay open down to 2,600 metres until June 12, with the season eventually closing, as planned, on July 5, with more than 1.5 metres of snow still sitting between 3,200 and 3,600 metres.

Eighty years in the making

The numbers sit against a genuinely long institutional history. Les 2 Alpes traces its roots to 1939, when a primitive rope tow was installed on the plateau — only to collapse fifteen minutes after its opening ceremony, before the outbreak of war halted development altogether. It wasn't until Christmas 1946 that the resort's first proper ski lift, a button lift on the Pied Moûtet slopes, finally went into operation — the anniversary the resort is marking this winter. From there, growth came in bursts: the Diable gondola opened in 1956, the resort had swelled to 40 hotels and 46 lifts by 1970, and 1984 brought glacier access via the Jandri Express, still billed as one of the world's fastest ski gondolas. Five years later, the Dôme Express became the highest funicular in France, linking the glacier's base to the Dôme de Puy Salié at 3,421 metres.

To mark eight decades of that history, Les 2 Alpes will host a dedicated anniversary evening at the base of the slopes from December 22, featuring period costumes, pioneer-era storytelling and a large-scale drone light display, with historical exhibitions running at local cultural venues throughout the season.

New for winter 2026-27

Beyond the anniversary festivities, the resort's investment for the coming season centres on its beginner infrastructure and dining scene. The Champamé lift at the base of the slopes is being replaced entirely, aimed at improving comfort, visitor flow and safety for beginners and families. A new toy for late-afternoon exploration, the E-Trott-Rider — an all-terrain electric snow scooter with oversized tyres, open to guests 14 and up under qualified supervision — joins the resort's activity roster, while the long-running Ski Safe initiative continues to expand, with a dedicated team of roughly ten ski patrollers, backed by the resort's wider 77-strong patrol force, working to weave safety messaging and active flow management directly into the on-slope experience.

On the food side, two new restaurants join a scene that already spans some 80 restaurants and 30 bars across Les 2 Alpes, Venosc and Mont-de-Lans: 1879 – La Table des Mounier, the historic dining room of the resort's 4-star hotel, opening its doors to non-residents for the first time with a menu built around sharing, and Les Copain's, a friendly, affordably priced newcomer serving generous, traditional French fare. Hotel Les Lutins, a trendy property at the foot of the Jandri cable car, has meanwhile been awarded a third star following an environmentally minded refurbishment — one entry in a hotel scene the resort describes as heavily independent and family-run, including the Mounier family's eponymous four-star hotel, now in its fifth generation of ownership, and La Belle Étoile, run by Italian-born manager Enrica Tassot across an unusually long nine-month season. Further down the line, the resort's central artery, the two-kilometre Avenue de la Muzelle, is undergoing a major redesign — wider sidewalks, dedicated bike lanes, more high-altitude greenery — due for completion by 2028.

Terrain built the wrong way round

What makes Les 2 Alpes distinctive on snow, according to its own marketing, is a topography that runs opposite to most Alpine resorts: rather than confining gentle terrain to the valley floor and difficulty to the peaks, the mountain gets easier the higher it goes. With 220 kilometres of piste and 75% of the terrain above 2,100 metres, the resort's beginner offering climbs as high as 3,200–3,400 metres via the blue Balade du Jandri run, letting first-timers ski among genuine high peaks with Écrins National Park views, before riding the Jandri cable car straight back down. Experienced skiers, meanwhile, are pointed toward one of the longest continuous runs in the French Alps — top to bottom from 3,600 metres to the village of Mont-de-Lans at 1,300 metres, a full 2,300 vertical metres without taking a lift. Freestylers get a snowpark at 2,600 metres (with a second zone above 3,000 metres in spring), and freeriders have an 800-hectare off-piste playground spanning 3,600 to 1,400 metres, accessible through the resort's Bureau des Guides and ski schools.

Letting guests see how the mountain actually works

One of the more unusual threads running through this season's programming is transparency about resort operations themselves — a direct response, the press materials note, to growing public scrutiny of the safety, environmental impact and long-term future of ski resorts generally. Guests can join ski patrollers for First Track (€22), shadowing the team that analyses the snowpack, secures pistes and triggers avalanche control before the lifts open to the public; take a Snow Workshop (€15) inside the resort's snowmaking plant; ride along on a snow-groomer shift (€49); or tour the machinery of the Jandri cable car itself (€15).

That transparency extends to the resort's snowmaking operation, run by lift company SATA 2 Alpes. The resort's roughly 350 snow guns use only water and air, and are deployed under what the operator describes as a strategy of measured, weather-led production — activated mainly to consolidate the base layer early in the season, and only when temperature, wind and humidity conditions are right, with production halted the moment conditions shift to avoid waste. The latest-generation grooming fleet runs on HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil) rather than standard diesel, and is fitted with the Snowsat radar system, which measures snowpack depth to centimetre-level accuracy so grooming can preserve natural snow cover and cut unnecessary energy use.

A full events calendar

The season's events programme leans into the resort's identity as both a serious winter-sports training ground and a party destination. ANENA, France's National Association for the Study of Snow and Avalanches, returns for its 8th edition of blasting-officer training (late October to late November) and 21st edition of avalanche dog-handler training (late November to early December) — the latter putting roughly twenty human-dog pairs through 88 hours of practical and theoretical instruction over 11 days. The Rise Festival, now in its 12th year, brings more than 7,000 British festival-goers to the resort for a week of skiing, live music and DJ sets in early December, while Christmas and New Year bring the resort's "Magic Avenue" light displays, torchlit processions and fireworks. Later in the season, the Lumières de la Muzelle night trail (January 16, 14th edition) draws roughly 2,000 runners through the snow-covered Oisans landscape after dark, the Montées de Venosc Challenge (March 28) sees participants attempt as many ascents as possible of a legendary local trail in 12 hours, and the Arès Ride (April 10, 2nd edition) offers a 13-kilometre competitive and public downhill from 3,400 to 1,650 metres, alongside the Black Garden Party mountain-biking weekend.

By the numbers

Les 2 Alpes draws roughly 300,000 visitors each winter and sold 1.5 million ski days last season, with 80% of visitors coming specifically to ski. The resort logged 1.9 million overnight stays in the past year, up 2.2%, across 32,746 tourist beds. Its customer base remains majority domestic — 55.8% French — with the UK the largest overseas market at 18.3%, followed by Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Lift prices for the main 2026/27 season (December 19 to April 9) start at €68 per adult day pass, or €333 for a week, with a 20% pre-season discount running November 28 to December 18 and a 15% discount in the tail end of the season from April 10.

The bigger picture

For a ski industry increasingly preoccupied with the reliability of natural snow, Les 2 Alpes' entire pitch this season — the 218-day calendar, the glacier access into July, the emphasis on measured rather than maximal snowmaking — reads as a resort leaning deliberately into its one genuinely rare asset: altitude. At 3,600 metres, it holds the highest ski area in France, and eighty years after a rope tow collapsed fifteen minutes into its own opening ceremony, that altitude remains the thing the resort is still, most fundamentally, selling.