SnowSlider – Blogging From the mountains by ise

After not posting any photo’s for ages, here’s two days one after another! Obviously slightly busier today with the main holiday season kicking in so there was a small queue for the lift, in fact the new, increased capacity car looks like it’s copying reasonably well all things considered. But, I’d decided to skin up anyway, I’ve not skinned up to the top for ages so today was a good day for some exercise.
The trouble was, after doing a lot of nordic skiing recently, my skis felt like they weighed a ton, on any moderate gradient nordic skis are just so much better so it felt a bit like hard work until I got warmed up and into a groove.
But, a nice day which is what I took a couple more photo’s.

A few shots around Zinal as I’ve not posted many for ages, in part because I’ve been doing some other things elsewhere but also because I’ve not taken any. I actually left without my camera this morning but turned round to get it as an afterthought.

We were noticing it getting busier during the day, not sure if there’s a particular reason for that or it’s a sign that people are arriving for the holidays and grabbling a few extra hours on the slopes.

There’s always a series of slides along that ridge although I  think these were triggered by the piste security guys, it’s an obviously unsafe slope although the angle may not be too clear from the photo’. It’s likely it’ll snow again and we’ll see people skiing it regardless though, I’ve actually watched one person trigger a slide on it and they were lucky enough to ski out. His mates were stood underneath and we’re lucky not be hit by the debris.

And finally, looking like a long way down to Zinal. This can be a gem after fresh snow but the moguls have got to a size where the snow can’t fill them in, nevertheless it was about the best I’ve skied it this season.

Taking advantage of the extended peak season buses I went over to Grimentz for only the second time this season. The snow’s pretty good over there, the pistes are in great condition and there’s still the odd pocket of good snow off-piste although by and large it’s a bit lumpy. I spent most of the time up on the higher slopes before taking a spin down to the small village of St-Jean which although it’s got no lifts does have a bus stop to get back.


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This was the second day of the advanced avalanche course and we headed to Villars, the nice surprise being as I was about to trade in one of discount lift tickets I found out they were only charging 20 chf anyway which is pretty good.

The main objective of the day didn’t quite pan out though, an access lift we wanted to make a steepish descent into some interesting terrain wasn’t running so we had to improvise around the area. That wasn’t so bad though, there was some nice powder on some slopes and some pretty interesting snow in our avalanche pits!

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