If you have had your fill of skiing with the hoi polloi at Verbier & 4 Vallèes, join the true elites(!) and experience the Pays du St Bernard trilogy of pleasures - Champex-Lac (kinda sorta pronounced Shompee-Lack, with due apologies to all Swiss French speakers!), La Fouly & Vicheres-Liddes. Simple lifts, cheap passes, uncrowded, steeeep in parts, delightfully mellow in others, awesome tree skiing, powder ...... get the gist? For all this though, one has to put aside any ski lift prejudices gathered over your life’s journey. Slow double chairs & surface tows are ‘du jour’, so keep your expectations low and you won’t be disappointed.

We skied the trilogy of pleasures in January 2026 after seeing out a massive winter storm in nearby Bruson & Verbier. Staying at Hôtel Terminus just near the train station in Orsieres provided us a fantastic central base and made the journeys to each of the three ski areas painless. We could have taken the bus from the station but as we had a rental car & limited time, on the road we went.

First we skied La Fouly. A scenic journey, parking near the ski lifts with views up to hanging glacial seracs, and no one in the line for first lifts will give anyone a boost, including us. Paying a relative pittance for a lift pass that covers all three ski areas then puts one into the stratosphere!

Away from the Pays du St Bernard’s best beginner ski area, the terrain at La Fouly is generally quite steep (but not as steep as Champex-Lac) and feels bigger than its 600m vertical. Maybe it’s the incredible vista opposite the ski area of the high alpine ridge from Mont Dolent (located on the border with France AND Italy) to Aiguille de l'A Neuve that gives it an enhanced sense of verticality?

The luscious off-piste routes from the top of the chair and T-bar had been well chewed by La Fouly’s clearly enthusiastic local powder hounds, but one could see the potential had we been a day earlier (that old chestnut hey, “you should have seen it yesterday!”). Most of the terrain exits back down into the top of the beginner area, so navigation is straightforward. Even saw a capercaillie (western grouse) emerge from the snow beside me out there! After so many years in the Alps that’s a first for us.

Piste-wise, La Fouly is not for foolies. Beginners are limited to cat tracks winding down the mountain, intermediate runs are fast and the few blacks are as black as anything going. With a little more local knowledge, we’d reckon there is plenty more to explore in the sidecountry of La Fouly, but time limited our capacity to do so. Next time for sure. And there will be a next time!

Champex-Lac is certainly a ski area of interest to all powder hounds, particularly for lovers of steeep trees & similar shenanigans. Parking amongst a handful of cars directly at the bottom of the double chair and looking up the line provides an inflated sense of the skiable vertical at Champex-Lac (it is around 600m). And as a previous reviewer (Matt) noted, the tree skiing from the highest points has a similar feel to North America, think Red Mountain or Whitewater. Of course there are plenty of cruisier alternatives further along the valley trail to drop into terrain less forbidding and super-fun. The upper mountain bowl has easy access off-piste lines from the cat track, and they can be increased in length by boot-packing to the top of La Breya and dropping in for more serious lines ( avalanche conditions pending!!).

On piste Champex-Lac offers nothing for novices (in the main area anyway), but progressing beginners will likely enjoy (actually we did too!), the incredible long and scenic blue trail that heads all the way back down the lift base. Intermediate riders can cut lonely mid-week laps via the top chair on three variations of groomer, but they are all shortish. There were no groomed advanced pistes when we visited, they were effectively ungroomed off-piste. And that’s just fine when its tracked powder.

The facilities at Champex-Lac ski area felt limited due to the recent burning down of the mountaintop restaurant. The charred remains still sit there for all to see. Luckily the nearby village has plenty on offer.

The last of the ski areas, Vichères-Liddes is by far the most approachable of the three Pays du St Bernard ski resorts. Whilst similar to the others with its 600m ish skiable vertical, there is more open, gentler terrain that suits a wider cohort of the ski population (except novices*). But gentler doesn’t mean less fun, it’s just not as potentially hair-raising off the piste as either Champex-Lac or La Fouly. The road heading up to the lift base from Liddes village is very narrow in parts. All drivers need to be cautious (but that almost goes without saying in these parts). A short stroll from the mountainside car park (so different to the other ski areas where the car parks are in valleys) gets one to yes, you guessed it, another old, slow double chairlift. From the top of the chair powder hounds can drop straight into light larch glades for pleasurable turns. Repeating powder laps off the chair is possible for hours as one works along the cat tracks to drop in. Groomerhounds can slide across to a couple of surface tows where the region's best variety of wide-open pistes run cross the entire upper mountain. The small novice zone on the mountain is ridiculously situated and, given the distance from the top of chairlift, totally unrealistic for anyone new to the sport to utilise (*Note - so best go to La Fouly instead). The piste back to the chairlift base is a humdinger at speed. As with the other two ski areas, midweek crowds are non-existent and sense of quiet in amongst the splendour of the mountains is divine.

Of the villages, La Fouly is tiny, cold & dark but has the most spectacular surrounds & feel of isolation. Champex-Lac is the sunniest and comes with the added bonus of numerous hotels, restaurants & a frozen lake for non-ski sliding! Liddes is the easiest to get to and is handy for ski-touring around the Great St Bernard Pass & Hospice or heading into Italy for a sneaky jaunt to an Aosta Valley ski area. To cover them all in one trip, Orsieres is the most central and convenient for using public transport. Also easy to spend a day or two at Bruson & Verbier from Orsieres.

None of the Pays du St Bernard's ski areas are big enough to keep one occupied for a week unless there is some fresh snow, so once you have done each a few times, expand your ski horizons further by heading through the Great Saint Bernard Tunnel to Italy and try one of our all-time faves, Crevacol.

See our thoughts on the resort’s pros & cons via the Pays du St Bernard overview page.

See our video here

The Pays du St Bernard trio of ski areas were a lovely adjunct to skiing at the 4 Vallées and in complete contrast. Verbier and friends were big, modern, and expensive, whilst the Pays du St Bernard ski areas were each small, exuded plenty of nods to the old school ways, and affordable, particularly if you wanted to traipse around to all 3 ski areas in one day on one lift pass. Another major contrast was that Verbier et al were busy whereas St Bernard powder hounds could lazily find fresh tracks at their leisure and there were zero queues for the lifts.

Another commonality of the Pays du St Bernard ski resorts (and Verbier) was the dramatic big-mountain scenery.

Here are my (and other) reviews of each of the ski areas:
- La Fouly
- Champex-Luc
- Vichères-Liddes

The town of Orsières was a great base to ski at 4 Vallées as well as Pays du St Bernard. It’s a small town with character, classic old wooden buildings, historic bridges, and what would a little European town be without a church with a bell tower? The town looked particularly pretty with a fresh coat of white, and it goes without saying that the fresh snow also enhanced the skiing.

We stayed at the affordable Hotel Terminus, which was key considering the Swiss franc can be ouch worthy on the credit card. The room was simple yet very functional and the shower delightfully hot, and there was a small lounge area to congregate. In addition to eating at a local restaurant (L’Ourson), we had drinks at the bar and dinner at the hotel’s restaurant in both the “casual” and “formal” zones. This powder hound is still drooling just thinking about the food and local apéritifs.
See our video here

Waited 5 days at the end of a major storm cycle for Champex-Lac to open and boy was it worth it! First thing you see is the Berra double which appears to go straight up from the base. From the top there is an open bowl and a second chair, or you have your choice of endless lines through the forest - either on the insanely steep and technical liftline face or off the blue piste. The terrain is more reminiscent of something in North America than what you'd find in Europe - steep but well spaced tree skiing with plenty of obstacles and cliff bands - and it needs to have snowed recently, but when it's on, it's on! There's not really any off piste for non-expert riders and the avalanche hazard can't be understated. Pistes are quite limited as well so it's really a one trick pony. Day tickets cost 46 CHF, but I showed my Magic Pass and they gave me a season pass for 69. I think this works for any season pass.
See our video here

If you want untouched powder, take the top t-bar (at La Fouly) and (looking down the mountain) go skiers right. Duck the rope and then continue further skier's right before dropping wherever you'd like, as all runs converge into the same gully which leads you back to the piste. The freeride zones are accessed and skied very quickly, small verticle, and surprisingly popular on a powder day. The lift ticket is cheap around 46 CHF, if you have a 4 Vallees season pass, it's free. I recommend going here on very low-visibility days because it's hard to get lost off piste and you have the trees to help guide you when skiing. Wasn't a bad experience at all, but certainly wasn't out of this world, however we did go on a very low-vis windy day during the recent storm. Snow was decent, powder to be found.
See our video here