It’s 2.30pm and the weekend crowd at Val Thorens’s La Folie Douce is winding up towards its afternoon apogee.

There are five Folies across the ski resorts of the French Alps. Broadly told, they are chalet-style mountain restaurants with big outdoor terraces.

More accurately they are restaurant inside and Ibiza-style outdoor party outside with DJs, MCs and live musicians whipping early aprés-ski crowds into table-dancing Bacchanalia. The Val Thorens Folie’s terrace is traversed by a chairlift that affords skiers a bird’s eye view of the debauchery.

Indeed, the lift finishes only a matter of metres further up the mountain and our Ecole Ski Francais guide Bernard Deves tells us that soon after the Folie opened in Val Thorens a dress code had to be strictly enforced after one too many chairlift meerkats brought the thing to a halt by forgetting to get off, so distracted were they by the scantily-clad gyrations below. Apocryphal possibly, but you get the idea.

The area around La Folie Douce is painstakingly swept at closing time to make sure no hard-charging casualties are left unable to get down the mountain.

Riskily perhaps, it’s not so much aprés-ski, more pendant/during ski.

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I was out in Val Thorens for what’s known as La Grande Premiere - the opening weekend of the season. This year it was November 25-26. A ribbon is cut at the Peclet lift station and 2017-18 is on.

This year, as usual, the pistes were fully covered in snow for the launch day, but white-out conditions saw us feeling our way into our first turns of the season. However the pay-off was that a further foot or so of snow throughout the day and night would see us waking up to a proper winter wonderland of blue skies and immaculately-groomed pistes come Sunday.

The clamour for this opening weekend is huge. It’s been a long summer for these particular disciples and new outfits and hardware are rolled out as atrophied calves and quads are shocked back to life.

99 per cent of the Val Thorens ski area is between altitudes of 2,000m and 3,230m

Once the go-to resort for students and the generally budget-constrained skier, Val Thorens has dragged itself upmarket in no uncertain terms.

Now home to four five-star hotels and several Michelin-starred restaurants, the resort attracts a whole different crowd to the one that came for the cheap self-catering apartments that used to characterise this southern-most of the Three Valleys. Teslas/BMWs and bling SUVs have replaced the once-ubiquitous vans and Renault 5s. And, of course, La Folie Douce’s EDM and €8 beers are hardly the fare of the baguette-on-the-lift brigade.

But, all this aside, there’s one particularly powerful ace in Val Thorens’s strengthening hand. The village centre is at a head-spinning 2,000m.

As glaciers recede and snowfalls dwindle across the Alps, this should not be under-estimated. It’s testament to this that we’re riding powder in November and that the LED signs above the lifts are proudly proclaiming that they’ll be open until May 8.

Val Thorens’s piste skiing itself is as varied as it is snowsure. For beginners, the gentle nursery slopes run parallel to the village frontage with fenced off areas for lessons. On Sunday we rode with Maxime Goby from independent ski school Prosneige.

He took us into their fenced-off nursery area. This wide strip of slope real estate is home to slalom cones and all manner of kids snow toys as well as adult learning areas. At its heart on the village frontage is their shop/playroom/terrace where parents can watch their kids and students can take a break.

Val Thorens has 78 pistes and 150km of runs and is linked with Les 3 Vallées, the world’s largest ski area with 600km of marked runs

For intermediates visiting Val Thorens, there are dozens of greens, blues and reds. And for the advanced there are blacks and extensive side and back-country opportunities.

The stunning views east and south from La Cime de Caron afford views of mountains in Italy and all the way to the likes of La Barre des Ecrins in the southern Alps.

Heading north over the 2,850m Col de la Chambre you reach the linked resorts of Meribel and Courchevel. For the stat-minded, there are 78 pistes in Val Thorens and 318 in the whole Three Valleys.

It’s three years since I’ve been to Val Thorens and it’s impossible to miss its shift of focus.

Spas have always been popular in ski resorts with the burning and inflamed muscles of the largely sedentary craving relief. Visitors collapse into saunas, hammams, jacuzzis and on to massages tables in the sort of routines that in the summer keep Tour de France cyclists pedalling thousands of miles.

We stayed in the five-star Hotel Pashmina where a whole floor is given over to a mind-bogglingly luxurious L’Occitane en Provence-sponsored spa.

But now it’s not just spas. Yoga sessions, super foods and meditation are proliferating.

The indoor pool area in the 5-star Hotel Pashmina spa

Val Thorens has been offering their My Serenity guide since 2012 - a manual full of top well-being tips to follow during and after your stay in Val Thorens.

And businesses are getting on board. Supernova is a cafe opened by a former pro-freerider that offers is a vegetarian cafe selling vitamin-packed juices and smoothies, healthy ski breakfasts, vegan dishes plus local craft beer.

Alpine Art is a cafe-cum-art gallery where a contemporary menu is complimented by modern paintings and the opportunity to take part in Qi Gong meditation and movement sessions.

Val Thorens is ahead of the curve here. Indeed, among its many charms Hotel Pashmina offers a range of well-being options from a rooftop Igloo pod complete with bed-side log-burning stove and Nepalese prayer flag canopy to a complete table of breakfast superfoods.

This Zen shift is clearly consumer driven and certainly a generational thing.

And while the likes of La Folie Douce are cashing in by extending the traditional aprés ski avalanche into daytime, it could be that the next five-star generation are going to need every bit of faith healing they can get.

The ski-in, ski-out 5* Hotel Pashmina

Getting there:

The closest airport is Chambéry. BA flies from London City, Stansted and Manchester from mid-December

Chambery Airport

Val Thorens is also accessible from Geneva, Lyon and Grenoble airports.

Accommodation:

The five-star hotel Pashmina costs from €330 per night for two with breakfast

The 4-star Fahrenheit7 hotel, a fun, designer establishment, which opened in December 2016, won the title of best new hotel in the world at the World Ski Awards. And the five-star Altapura, opened by the talented Maison Sibuet in 2011, also won the title of best hotel in France

Skiing:

150km of runs, 99% of the ski area situated between altitudes of 2,000 metres and 3,230 metres.

Val Thorens is linked with Les 3 Vallées, the world’s largest ski area (600km).

Lift passes:

Adult one day: €52.5

Adult six-day: €250

For more information see:

www.valthorens.com

http://www.hotelpashmina.com/en/

Last month at the World Ski Awards in Kitzbühel (Austria), Val Thorens won the “World’s Best Resort” title for the fourth time.

Ski hire:

Intersport’s 2018 range of skis includes the award-winning Rossignol Sky 7s, Black Crows Daemons, Atomic Punx twin-tipped park skis, a full backcountry touring package and the amazing Nitro Q Snowboard series. Customers are free to swap and change the skis as many times as they like during the hire period so as to take advantage of any changing snow conditions during their holiday. Prices vary but average at around €8 per day, with Intersport bi-weekly discount codes being released via facebook.com/intersportskifrance

Crowdpleaser: La Folie Douce in full swing