Worst Snow This Season
At the end of the day, my thought was “I should have stayed in bed.”
Which is where I was when Brian called me at 10 a.m. with an enticing suggestion: Courmayeur. It’s been snowing, nice and cold, and Brian said he’d read there was 30 cm of new snow up there. Okay. Why stay in bed on a nice day when I can go skiing. I would kick myself if I’d heard later….”Dude, you fuck’n missed it! Epic! EPIC!”
So there we were, other side of MB tunnel, and made the decision to ride the telepherique Monte Blanco, and grab some runs down the Glacier de Toule. Yes! This would be epic. Backside views of the Aiguille du Midi and top of the Vallee Blanche, getting down to the glacier, and skiing with no one else within a mile.
And then I dropped a ski pole, watched it slide down a col, disappear over an icy ridge. Hey, no big deal. Brian has climbing gear with him. Just drop in at an easy point and retrieve the pole. He slid-scraped down this nasty col as I prepared to get over to the stairs.
And now I stood atop this same icy ridge without one of my trusted balance devices. The altitude topped 3,200 meters (that’s around 10,000ft for you metric cripples) and I was a bit dizzy (pretty much that way to begin with). I was facing the wrong way to slide down to the stairs that lead onto the glacier. I tried to execute a pirouette ski-over manuever, but saw my life flash as I lost balance and nearly fell backwards, on my ass, which would have sent me down this 50-degree ice slope, achieving 60 mph long before the jagged rocks helped me to stop. That would have sucked.
So I needed to take my skis off and turn around, put them on, and scurry down 15 feet and 25 feet across. It was sooooo pussy I was embarassed. But better that than dead.
Meanwhile, Brian’s girlfriend was up on the cornice, and she was stuck in the snow (a snowboarder, on foot over to the stairs). She needed to slip on her crampons and get back up (she had come in 20 yds further along, and that was worse than where I stood). Epic was turning into expedition.
I made the turn on my skis without loosing a ski down that slope along with my pole. Halfway down the stairs, we spotted the pole. Brian slipped over the side and belayed his way down and then back up. Success, of a sort. So finally we’re all together (girl was not happy Brian basically left her behind to get down to the stairs on her own—but who could know?), and we set off onto the glacier, cutting across to a wide powder field we could see beyond a rock slope.
The snow scraped beneath my skies and then bit at my ankles. This would let up when we got to the powder field, I thought. We stood above this field and then dropped into it. I immediately felt something was wrong. The snow had crusted over the top, it was chalky beneath, powdery beneath that, and frozen ice chunks below that.
I let myself get a little speed, thinking it would be easier to make a sweeping wide turn. I popped myself over the snow, turned to the right … and my skis stuck like arrows into a haybale target. I went flying over the tops of my skis, made a perfect duck and roll, and sunk into two feet of crusty chalk snow. Pretty much the whole way down the mountain was just like that.
Long, LONG story short …. it took us over an hour to get down to the Pavilion refuge (and bar!). I had had enough. Brian had had enough (“This sucks!”). Girl had had enough.
We had lunch, some wine, and got the hell off the mountain. Here’s the thing: it’s all about the experience. Sure we could have had an epic powder day, tasting the fresh snow as it sloughed into our mouths. But what fun is that? We can get that any day in Chamonix. We live here!
Living in Chamonix valley gives one a sense of play. It’s been a long winter of many ski days…not as much as I wanted or expected, but about as much as my body can handle. So when I get out on the mountain at noon, ski a couple runs, go in for a lovely French lunch, ski a few more runs, sit in the sun past four o’clock with a cold beer, then go home, there’s can be no complaints. Matter of fact, I’m so tired my finger joints can barely find the keys.
Snow on the mountains is no longer a problem. There are a few feet covering everything. This makes the snow consistent, especially on the steep stuff. You let yourself slide into turns and just when you feel you’ll go over the tops of the skis, you pivot through a turn and do it again, all the way down the hill if your burning legs and pounding heart can take it.
At the top, the runs showed fresh snow from the days before, where clouds hung high and consistently spread snowflakes across the Brevent. I skied down to the Cornu lift, found no line, and got onto the chair alone. Could this all be real? Looking across the slopes, I noticed many fewer skiers than just a few days before. Maybe the last of the tourist waves from UK and France had finally left the valley for we bumbs.
The view up Grand Montets yesterday cast raindrops in our eyes, punctuated by low clouds that killed visibility for a few runs. A coffee break helped, and me, Matt & Pat got back onto the Bochard Bubble with hope.
The Ryan Bros. are in town for a few days, and Brevent knackered them into much by 2.30. That’s good skiing! With the rain storm and high winds closing off skiing yesterday, we visited Annecy, where the first glimmers of todays sunshine broke across that beautiful lake. Mussels and fries with a good pino noir, shopping at a skate-board-fucker shop, and walking along the clear waters was as good a substitute to no skiing as one could get from living in the French Alps.
