SnowSlider - Blogging From the mountains by ise

First visit of the season to Rougemont although we skied off the Eggli lift a few weeks back pre-season opening. Rougemont’s one of the three main distint areas of Gstaad with about 90km of pistes. The big peak is La Videmanette and is known locally as the “Die Gstaader Dolomiten” and there’s some similarity.

There’s a gallery here but the pictures aren’t quite as good as I’d like, I was using a new camera for the first time in the snow and I need to work a little with the white balance and exposure.

The skiing’s great but some of the lifts are getting a little old although it’s part of the charm of the area, fortunately the worst, slowest 2-man chair’s been replaced this season with a new 4-man lift which travel at about 5-times the speed of the old one.

The run back from La Videmanette is excellent, long and scenic with views down the valley.

I’ve not been to Gstaad much this season, no particular reason, I’ve just been doing other things. It’s a disjoint area, the pass covers six sectors including Château d’Oex, Rougemont, Les Diablerets and Saanenmöser. Château d’Oex is too small really, Rougement is fairly high and has good snow while Saanenmöser is the most extensive area.I tried to park at Schönried but the car park was full, a local race I think so I ended up at Saanenmöser.

It was pretty heavy snow today, yesterday in the Grand Massif wasn’t so bad in comparison. Nevertheless, the skiing was quite good and the weather was really nice. I’d taken a couple of sandwiches with me to have a picnic in the sun.

In fact, I’d sat outside one of the pisteurs huts and was enjoying my sandwich when a snow boarder tried to give me part of a T-bar mistaking me for one the pisteurs. Apparently, he and a another border had been riding it when the seat part snapped off and they fell off.

I was enjoying skiing on my new Stöckli skis but they were not really the best ski for the day, I ought to have taken my Zag’s which would have less effort in the slush. At around 4pm though the temperature started to drop quite quickly and the snow noticeably firmed up which made the last hour really good particularly as people seemed to have left by then.

Being a nice spring day there were just some great views over the local area:

I left the house heading for Gstaad and was intending to park at Rougemont so it was surprising to find myself at Leysin in some ways.I’d recalled that the company I used to work at in Germany had their ski weekend to Leysin so I thought I’d decided on route to pop over and see if anyone I knew was around.

Leysin’s a pretty small place so I was surprised not to actually see anyone I knew although it was pretty cold and I maybe should have made a more vigorous search of the bars and restaurants.

They’re pretty well organized over at Leysin you can park on the outside of the village and get a free bus to the lift, if you want to park next to the lift you have to pay which I thinks a good idea.

Conditions are still very good, it’s a bit hard packed in places but I’d put a fresh edge onto my Zags before leaving this morning so, although they’re not the ideal ski for hard pack, they were handling pretty nicely.

It’s still very cold so by 4:30pm I have to say I’d had enough, it was just too cold on the chairlifts to be comfortable.

I went home over the Col des Mosses rather than hit the traffic at Glion coming from the Valais/Verber direction, as it was snowing heavily this was a bit exciting and I was sliding around in the car a bit, even back down round Chateux d’Oex and through to Bulle was pretty wild and it didn’t ease much on the autoroute round Lac Gruyere.