I’d rather forgot that it was going to snow last night, we’d been out at the GuggAnniv’Band up the valley which was loud and a bit madcap. I can’t really describe the music well but you can get a clip here: music clip. We weren’t so early getting up this morning but even though it was slightly busy there was still enough of the fresh snow around for nice skiing.


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This is a raquette route we wanted to do for a while, starting from the village of Mottec, which is a few km away down the hill, wandering along some forest tracks to Grimentz. It’s actually slightly dark in the forest in places and there’s not too much sunshine so it was cold at times. There’s a lot of signs of the abundant wild life but the noise of us on the raquettes gives more than enough warning to the animals and they make themselves scarce.


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There’s some good touring conditions currently, a stable snow pack and, if you can get away from the ski area, still some good snow to be found. So a group of four of us, David, Neil, Claire and myself set out for a ski tour from Grimentz. Our basic route was to take the lifts to Becs de Bosson and head over the col de Louche then ski down the val d’Rechy to L’Ar du Tsan. From L’Ar du Tsan then to climb La Brinta and ski down the Orxival to St Jean to pick the post bus back to Grimentz. I’d picked this route because I guessed some of the sheltered aspects of the route would have preserved the snow which turned out to be a good guess and we found some pretty nice snow.

I recorded the route as file for Google Earth : Google Earth Track File


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Today was much improved on yesterday in terms of weather, yesterday was really flat light and along with an increase in numbers on the piste it wasn’t really the best ski day. After a late start this morning we decided on the spur of the moment to go show shoeing around Zinal. I’ve done this route before but Julie hadn’t and it’s really quite excellent and it starts quite literally outside our front door which is convenient.