SnowSlider - Blogging From the mountains by ise

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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In contrast to the excitement and crowds last weekend as the lifts opened for the first time of the season today was a more relaxed day. First thing this morning down in the village it was pretty overcast and damp so we were surprised to glance at the web cam and see it was sunny at the top. Temperatures have been high during the week and the snow at village level in Zinal has suffered, overnight some light rain turned to snow and at village level we had a little snow.

Up in the ski area a little more snow fell so we had a few centimetres of powder off-piste and ski conditions were probably better than last weekend with empty slopes as a bonus.

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I’ve been wanting to get out skis since the snow fell and today presented the best chance. There’s not so many places here in Zinal it’s safe to ascend solo, climbing into the ski area is awkward because some sections of the route are exposed to avalanche risk and looking over yesterday the cover’s not brilliant anyway.

My plan was always to go to Grimentz and climb up there for a couple of reasons, the snow base should be better as I think they’ve had the cannons going on the lower slope and there’s a track that meanders up through the woods which is ideal to ascend and the route isn’t exposed to elevated avalanche risk. The plan worked well with the only mishap of the day being that I made a flask of coffee and forgot to put in my rucksack, so reaching 2200m I decided to stop for a coffee only to be disappointed.
There were some tracks on the way up which I hopped into, it makes things easier, from a couple of skiers maybe yesterday from the state of the trail. I’m not sure where they went as there was no descent tracks at all. Obviously the untracked powder is a bonus!

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It always looked optimistic to me for Zinal to open this weekend (10th Nov) and it’s now announced that it’s postponed until 17th Nov. Some more snow is forecast over the next week and snow making will continue. The plan is that Zinal will open weekends only for the general public until Dec 8th when it will open during the week as well. Progress with the snow cannons has been pretty impressive so far and a considerable quantity of snow has been laid down. This is from the webcam today (8th Nov) :

The current webcams :