SnowSlider – Blogging From the mountains by ise

Although the phot0′s don’t show many people it was relatively busy at Les Rasses, quite a few cars in the car park although many would be snow-shoeing or strolling and a few people on the loipes. We took a 10km classic loipe along the nice valley over rolling nordic terrain before having a drink when I changed to my skate skis and had a quick session trying to develop my technique there. I’ve decided I need to sharpen my feet technique a bit, the amount of classic I’ve been doing has built up enough upper body power that it’s just easy on skates to rely on that and not really skate well, although the problem is that’s pretty tiring of course.

Having recently converted to nordic skate skis my distance in a day has been dramatically curtailed, in fact I’ve dropped from being able to do over 40km in a day to single figures! I was actually a bit surprised by this, I expected to be dropping a bit of distance but not really this much. Although it seems a contradiction I’m actually moving quicker on the skate skis but it’s more demanding than I expected. However, I probably need to find out what sort of distance people are considering normal for a skate session, I’ve seen a couple of articles suggesting people are doing much shorter and more intense circuits which maybe consistent with my experience.

In some ways that’s a shame, I’ve never been to Schwarzenbühl before,  despite it being only 28km in a straight line from home albeit more like 40km by road though, so I’d have liked to look around more at the 45km or trails they have. But, the skate skis confined me to a small part of the area. As the photo’s show, it was a bit cloudy which was disorientating for me, I’d have said I know this area pretty well and that I’d climbed, skied or walked up most of the peaks around here but this one isn’t known to me at all. It’s a small group of hills or summits that run up from Zollhaus near Schwarzsee the highest of which is barely 1600m but they’ve a substantial amount of snow and I was pretty glad of both the 4-WD and winter tyres on the small access road.

Good snow, well prepared and quiet although I don’t quite understand how it works at the weekend, there’s an 8km alpine ski area which doesn’t sound much but the runs actually looked really good and with the current cover it’s clearly possible to ski well below the bottom of the lift through some classic pre-alpes terrain. I’d assume that the alpine area gets a few skiers at the weekend so along with the nordic skiers, and the people on the network of winter trails, I can’t quite understand how access works. The road up isn’t great and even on a weekday it was hard to park. There was a bus parked up and I’d guess you must park in the valley and get the bus up which looks a good idea. A particularly good idea as I reckon on a good day you’d be able to ski a long way back down to the valley off-piste.

So all in all, I’d be tempted to pop back with some different gear, classic touring gear, snow shoes or even some alpine touring gear, if I get the time.