SnowSlider - Blogging From the mountains by ise

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.

A fairly quiet day and a later start, we took the ski bus over to Grimentz and did a couple of runs before taking the itinerary from the Avoin run down to St-Jean. I’d joined this run the other day when we skied down from the Orxival after climbing La Brinta. In truth it’s not much of an itinerary and more of a prepared piste and pretty hard pack at the moment. Actually, it was awkward, I’ve been using my Garmont MegaRides recently on the new Black Diamond Voodoos and but today, to satisfy my curiosity, switched to my Garmont Endorphins to see how they worked.

The result seems to be that the Endorphins over power the Voodoos somewhat, that’s just not the case with the Endorphins and the Stormrider XL’s I was using last season. Both skis are mounted with Fritschi Freeride Plus touring bindings but Voodoos are longer, fatter and have a little more flex than the Stormriders and it really makes a difference. I’d have to try some other combinations but my instinct is that the Endorphin, and consequently boots like the Axon, really only work with actual downhill skis like my Stormriders for example. The Endorphins paired with the Voodoos, which are basically a fat back country ski, just didn’t seem to work at least for the hard pack we were on today.


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I’d rather forgot that it was going to snow last night, we’d been out at the GuggAnniv’Band up the valley which was loud and a bit madcap. I can’t really describe the music well but you can get a clip here: music clip. We weren’t so early getting up this morning but even though it was slightly busy there was still enough of the fresh snow around for nice skiing.


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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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