SnowSlider - Blogging From the mountains by ise

It’s a regular pastime around here to skin up to the Sorebois but until today something I’d not done, I decided it might make a change to give it a try. In general I’m not a huge fan of people skinning up the piste as it can be a bit dangerous, downhill skiers don’t really expect to come around a corner and meet someone making an ascent after all. But, the ascent to the Sorebois is reasonable, there’s a road that contours up in places and there’s good visibility for the sections you need to keep on the piste, higher up you can get off the piste and track up through the powder.


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Above left, a view to La Brinta and Orxival where we skied the other day and above right, a pretty tracked out Abondance itinerary. So far the snow that was expected hasn’t started and the clouds that formed this morning seem to have disappeared. Expecting snow we’d postponed a trip to St Luc in favour of a trip to Grimentz which was slightly busy but still fairly good snow at least on the pistes but getting a crust on off-piste south facing slopes.

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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