UKC

Evening everyone,

I don't know if any of you have heard, but most of the Alps is painfully snow-free at the moment. We had a 2mm dusting last night, there's a few inches coming tonight, but other than that we've had nothing for six weeks now. But that doesn't mean there isn't fun to be had. I'd like to share this short film I made last week about an outing with a fair few rocks, but some pretty great skiing too.

youtube.com/watch?v=Xkoh5B9RLKk&

Cheers all, have a smashing day.

Pete

In reply to Pete Houghton:
Nice. Challenging route finding

In reply to Pete Houghton:

Well that is very impressive, with some classic jump turns demonstrated.

But God, it does look horribly dry, like just about everywhere in the Alps.

In reply to pneame:


Nah, just follow your footsteps! We weren't following any idea of a line on the way up, we just went for an explore and took what we thought was skiable as high as it would go... luckily enough, we ended up at a steep-sided breche overlooking Switzerland. A natural enough stopping point, and getting back down was just a case of reversing the bootpack.
Here is a picture of the line we took (I think the link should work):
https://scontent-cdg2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/15732711_10210036179892383_3...

In reply to Simon4:


Yep! It's snowing now though, probably around 15cm flat in total, but the wind is shifting it around a bit, so hopefully it'll get packed into couloirs and over crevasses quite nicely. More coming next week, too. But year, for the last few weeks it's just been appalling.
Still, there's been enoug of this going on as well...
https://www.instagram.com/p/BO2ad-xh3MQ

In reply to Pete Houghton:

That's interesting, ice climbing looked pretty lean too from ice-fall.com. In fact, from reports, it looked as if nothing much was possible in the Alps other than some glorious walking conditions. Apart from Ben Briggs that is, who seems to have a genius for finding ski touring at least in some pretty unpromising conditions.

In reply to Pete Houghton:

Good grief!
Respect

In reply to Simon4:

Not really true to be honest, that huge dump of snow we had in November really did wonders up high, and it's been cold enough to look after the snow up there, to a point. What really suffered is snow in the 2000-3000m range (and lower, obviously), which meant that you just had to do a lot of walking to get to and from it, and a little bit of dry skiing to get over moraines and whatnot. This was enough to scare off an awful lot of people, which meant that the high mountains just weren't crowded, and you could really leave things to settle before thinking about going and skiing them.
Conditions, although quite dry in places, were for the most part cold, safe, and stable, and there have been people pushing the limits to a pretty impressive degree. A few new lines were put up in the Argentiere Basin over the last month, and one particularly gnarly dude skied the lower half of the north face of the Triolet. Personally, I've had some great days out skiing, and I managed to score some great snow weeks and weeks after the November storm, albeit with a bit of faff to get there. I have to say, if the price you need to pay to have such safe and uncrowded conditions up high is a bit of a plod across a blue glacier and a dusty moraine, then I'm happy to pay it.

And although ice climbing was pretty terrible a month ago, it's been growing steadily since then. I climbed at the Cremerie about two weeks ago and there were maybe a dozen people there, but for the last week there have been thirty or forty people a day there. Rive Gauche has seen a fair bit of action (including an awful lot of top roping), Rive Droit has had a few teams wander over there (results: long walk, fat enough, but very wet), and the Passon Icefalls (pictured above) are as fat as I've ever seen them, and seeing increasing traffic.
More and more good reports are coming in from Cogne and the other Italian valleys over the last two weeks, and the same for various spots in Switzerland.

So, it was slow to start, but things are really shaping up quite nicely now!

In reply to Pete Houghton:

My sister's in Meribel at the moment. The snow seems finally to have arrived. Or some, at least. Saw an all resort summary over Christmas, and it was grim reading; some regions had all resorts closed, and most with pitiful depth figures.

In reply to Pete Houghton:

We are glad we didn't book anything this year. We will see if we can grab a few days in Feb or March.

In reply to Pete Houghton:


Well a good effort on your part to get so much out of a very lean time, as well as carrying out some impressive descents. On the spot I suspect and determined enough to go out and look when things do not seem promising at all.