Piste colours explained: a resort's judgement, not a measurement
Green, blue, red and black, and why a red in France is not a red in Switzerland: what each piste colour means, and how steep each measures in four countries.
Piste colours tell you how hard a run is: in the Alps, blue is easy, red is intermediate and black is difficult, and France adds green below blue for the gentlest runs. Each resort grades its own runs, to rules that change at the border, so a red in France and a red in Switzerland are not the same run.
What each colour means
Green is the gentlest there is, a nursery slope or an easy path between lifts. You meet it mainly in France. Elsewhere in the Alps the easiest colour is usually blue.
Blue is easy. It is where most people go after the nursery slope, and where plenty of good skiers cruise.
Red is intermediate: steeper, and often narrower.
Black is difficult: steep, ungroomed, or both. In Italy, the law says a run that is not groomed must be marked black at its entrance.
North America uses a green circle, a blue square and a black diamond instead, and each resort grades a trail only against its own other trails.
What it means when you book a week
The rules differ by country. Italy writes ceilings into law: a blue no steeper than 25 percent and a red no steeper than 40, short stretches aside, with anything steeper black. France leaves the colour to the resort.
So we measured the runs themselves. The average French red has a gradient of 24.3 percent, the average Swiss red 19.9. Austrian reds average 23.4 and Italian reds 20.4. In plain terms, a French or Austrian red is just under one in four, and a Swiss or Italian red about one in five.
Blues travel better. The four countries' blues average between 14.4 and 16.4 percent, roughly one in six or seven wherever you are. If you ski blues, the colour means much the same across the Alps. If you ski reds, expect French and Austrian ones to feel a step harder than Swiss and Italian ones.
Resorts differ more than countries. Klosters' reds average 17.1 percent, the gentlest reds of the 55 resorts we cover, and gentler than the average blue at twelve of them. Kronplatz's blues average 20.2 percent, the steepest blues of the 55 resorts we cover, and steeper than the average red at ten.
The thing people get wrong
Reading the colour as a description of the whole run. A run's grade is set by its hardest pitch, so a red can be gentle for most of its length and earn its colour on one short, steep wall. Our figures are averages along each run, so they smooth that wall out too. The colour also says nothing about the day: the same red is a different run on a hard, icy morning than in soft spring snow.
So on a new run, assume the hard part is still to come until you have seen it.
Where to go next
Our measurement of all 55 resorts, how steep is a red run, has every resort's average blue, red and black side by side. If you are learning, our shortlist of high resorts that suit beginners ranks them on measured gentle ground rather than on colour. Marked itineraries carry their own signs and are not pistes at all; off piste or backcountry explains them. And if the run to your front door matters, what ski in ski out means covers the colour of that run too.
Planning a week in Klosters?
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