SnowSlider – Blogging From the mountains by ise

It’s well into spring touring time so today was a good time to take a trip. The objective was a journey through the val d’Anniviers into the vallon de Rechy and onto the ski station of Nax in the val d’Hérens. Neither David nor I had been to Nax before but we’ve both skied in the vallon de Rechy many times. We took a route up through Zinal skiing down to Grimentz and then taking the lifts up to near the Becs de Bosson and climbing over the col to ski into the Rechy.

It’s not bad skiing in the Rechy, it’s not particularly steep but the snow is reliable and you only ever see a handful of other people touring as well. It’s been a while since the last snow so you see a few tracks around but it’s not tracked out by any means.

Once we’ve got to the lowest point we’re going to hit we fix skins again and climb out up Mont Noble. Mont Noble is a small peak and it’s not a huge climb so we’re quickly up and looking over ski area into Nax. It turns out Nax has quite a few cruisey runs which are fun before a spot of lunch at a great little buvette and then a ski down through the forest on tracks to get to the village of Nax which is a little way below the ski area. From there it’s a bus to Sion, a train to Sierre and another bus back to Zinal.

…. and for the quip “Mont Noble …. not as grand as it sounds…” acknowledgments to David who made the remark as we finished the climb… it made me smile anyway….

There’s not been a huge amount of fresh snow in Zinal for little while so it’s all pretty tracked but there’s still some good skiing as always. I’d met up with David and we skied in the freeride area a little before heading to Grimentz via a nice couloir pitch. Over in Grimentz the steeper north facing couloirs were also skiing pretty well so we tried some of them before skiing down into St-Jean taking the bus back to Zinal via Grimentz.