At La Clusaz, in the French Aravis massif, one of skiers’ favorite sectors is preparing to shift into a higher gear for the 2026/27 season. In the famous Balme bowl, the fixed-grip four-person Col de Balme chairlift, in continuous operation since 1993, is making way for a new six-person detachable chairlift built by POMA, accompanied by targeted upgrades to slope profiles and programmed snowmaking.
In the schedule announced by the Haute-Savoie resort, the Balme massif will once again have the task of opening and closing the winter season: after an early-opening weekend set for Saturday, December 5 and Sunday, December 6, 2026, lifts in the sector will run daily from Saturday, December 12, 2026 through Sunday, April 25, 2027, well past the spring closing dates scheduled on L’Étale (April 4) and on the Aiguille and Beauregard sectors (April 11). Within this long season, the new chairlift is slated to make its debut as one of the headline upgrades for winter 2026/27.
Anyone familiar with La Clusaz’s 125 kilometers of slopes, spread across five distinct massifs between 1,100 and 2,600 meters of altitude, knows that Balme has a character all its own: a wide, high-mountain bowl where skiers love to linger and link repeat runs down the same face. On a line that skiers ride multiple times in a single day, moving from fixed-grip to detachable technology makes all the difference: the new six-person chairlift cuts ride time in half and brings hourly capacity to 3,000 passengers per hour, while ensuring slow-speed boarding and unloading as well as opening the line to pedestrian passengers heading up to high altitude.
Fewer towers along the line and more accessible runs in the bowl
From an environmental and architectural standpoint, the new installation follows the historic alignment of the old quad chair but reduces the total number of towers along the slope and introduces a partially underground top station, with chair storage integrated inside the terminals outside operating hours.
Work carried out between the two winter seasons was not limited to cables and stations, however. To make the Balme bowl enjoyable for a broader audience rather than only expert skiers, the municipality and the ski area also carried out regrading work on the Bergerie and Blanchot runs, smoothing out the trickiest sections so that intermediate skiers can descend more comfortably. Rounding out the on-mountain improvements are an expansion of the programmed snowmaking network and new preventive avalanche release systems, ready to support Balme’s long winter season all the way to late April.
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