SnowSlider - Blogging From the mountains by ise

Meeting up with David, Neil and Claire on the first lift this morning we’d plans to head over to Grimentz and climb into the Pas de Lona area from where we’d a couple of options. But, the top lift at Zinal wasn’t running due to high wind so we decided to head over near the Zinal Freeride area then climb up onto the ridge behind there and grab a line from there. From the top, between gusts of wind, we decided to cut far out across the mountain and access some slopes under the Garde de Bordon, this turned out pretty well……


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It was actually a nice day for photo’s and unusually I forget to take a camera, these are taken on the phone on my camera and they’re not so bad really. I met up with Neil and Claire in Zinal this morning and we skied a while over there before heading to Grimentz via dsome of the couloirs off the top of the Sorebois (pictures) which were pretty good. From there we also took another wide line off piste into the tree and hacked down an awkward gully before rejoining the main run.
Grimentz was pretty good as well, some of the little off-piste pitches skiing well and then a final descent from the Orxival taking line to bisect the Avoin piste above Grimentz, this skied well at the top and the traverse out while long was actually fairly skiable, a 10m section right near Grimentz needed us to take the skis off but otherwise the cover was good. In fact, we skied some fairly reasonable powder in places all day.

There’s an amount of snow forecast over the next few days, it was forecast to start last night and it was good to see the first instalment arrived as scheduled with a few cm of snow overnight. The cloud though dropped into the valley and has just hung there all day as you can see on the photographs. It’s still pretty cold which is a good sign I think, this new snow should stick around and I think it’s shaping up to be a great week.


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….. and it had snowed! It was forecast and it was snowing yesterday but it seemed to have stopped. Down in the village we had 10cm maybe of snow which looked enough for some nice skiing but at the top I found a bit more, up to 30cm in places where it had blown in. That promised to make a lot of the small chutes and couloirs quite good fun. Even better, it’s low season and we’re back to normal, all the “half term heroes” have gone home so it’s quiet and the slopes aren’t getting trashed as much.


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