Oops
I scared the crap out of myself this morning. I was skiing on the Grande Montets, just me & my ipod. I took the cable car to the very top – 3300m. The usual, pisted way down was really busy and looked a little icy and rubbish, so I decided to come down the front face. You can see this face all the way up in the cable car and it looks hard. It’s steep, there are chunks of glacier lying about as big as houses, there are crevasses and there are avalanches.
So I was following the tracks down. I’d seen plenty of people on it that morning and I knew that if I stuck to the areas which had been skied, it was safe enough. All of a sudden I found myself on a slope that had no tracks. I stopped dead and looked around to work out the reason there were no tracks.
Everything that I have learned about avalanche (which is admittedly not very much) screamed out to me. The shape of the slope, the wind loading, the type of snow, the weather; everything said …… avalanche. I had no choice though, so I skied down it as smoothly as possible and didn’t fall. Nothing happened. No avalanche and the most perfect 20 seconds skiing in the most amazing terrain ever with fresh tracks in beautiful snow. I see now why people get seduced into taking the risk. That 20 seconds was amazing. And frightening.
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