28th April 2008
After a couple of comfortable nights in the Jamtal we headed out for the Wiesbadener Hütte. Again this was a pretty comfortable hut with showers and good facilities. The plan from here was to skin up to the col below the Piz Buin and climb that.
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28th April 2008
This was the first day of a ski tour in the Silvretta region which is somewhere I’d never visited before. I was looking for a tour to hook up with and I recalled seeing a mail from John Stafford of the Eagle Ski Club suggesting a trip with the guide Andy Perkins. John confirmed a slot was still available so I met a group of other Eagles in Landeck on Saturday evening, in fact in a fluke of good timing I bumped into John at the station in Landeck-Zams as he arrived from Innsbruck and I stepped off the postbus from Ischgl. In another coincidence we were joined later by John How whom I’d met back in January at the cabane des Becs de Bosson near Zinal.
Sunday was spent skiing a little in the Ischgl area again so the guys who’d flown in from the UK could get their legs a little. A major bonus was that Jimmy Cliff was playing a concert on the slopes above Samnaun (CH), I’ve actually seen Jimmy Cliff in concert before in Switzerland at the Montreux festival in 2007.
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27th April 2008
All kinds of plans for this week came and went, at one stage I was going to the Oberland to climb the Finsteraarhorn but the weather up in the Oberland was awful and it’s a pretty awful place to get caught in bad weather. In the end as I was going to start a ski tour into the Silvretta from Ischgl I decided to go there a couple of days early and have a look at the Ischgl area in Austria.
It’s been quite some time since I skied in Austria, I was reckoning something like five years probably.
6th April 2008
Actually it is over, at least sort of. Today was the last day the lifts are running in the Val d’Anniviers, it’s tied to Easter and this year Easter is earliest it’s been since 1913 and it’s not going to be this early until 2228 again. We already know closing in the Val d’Anniviers is going to be April 19th next year and we can only hope the snow will be as good as it is right now.
Of course it’s not over at all, there’s still snow on the ground, and falling from the sky for that matter, so there’s still going to be some skiing. I’m not sure right now if I’ll be doing anymore lift served skiing though, the only firm plans I have are for some ski touring right now.
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