Looking at the last date of my last post, I see I haven’t written anything for over a week. It’s an indication of how fast and hectic life is here during the winter. The weeks are flying by, with the end of the ski season now firmly in sight.

We’ve had a lot of visitors to stay this year. The spare room is the office, so when people stay I’m away from my computer and that’s one reason for the lack of blog activity. I love having people to stay and a visit from an old friend from university last week, catching up after 5 years or so was brilliant.

The other reason for lack of blogging is of course, skiing. March has been a snowy month again this year. We had a dump of over a meter at the weekend and some of the best powder days of the season over the past few days. I’ve skied in some of the deepest snow I’ve ever skied. Face-shots a-plenty (when you’re skiing snow so deep that the snow sprays up into your face).

At this time of year the sun is also much stronger, and the temperatures rise. The snow transforms quickly, first becoming heavy, then chalky, then slushy toward the end of the day or lower down. Spring snow is a lot of fun, and ridiculous suntans are common. I’ve got a stupidly dark tan which stops at my neck.

There’s still the end of March and all of April to go. The lifts don’t stop running till the start of May. Now is the time for ski-touring. Getting up high into the mountains in the lovely warm weather to find the best snow conditions is what we’re aiming for now. The crevasses on the glaciers are now well covered with snow bridges, making them safer than at the start of the season. It’s time to start skiing the Vallee Blanche.

Twitter  Delicious  Facebook

The four of us carried on a great week of skiing with a ski tour from Flegere to Vallorcine. That’s about 20km by road. Even on skis taking a more direct route we probably covered around 14km over the 4 hours before stopping for lunch at the Buet hotel & taking the Vallorcine bubble back over to Le Tour and skiing home.

I’ve been trying to use my iPhone’s GPS to track our ski tours, with some success. Unfortunately the device ran out of batteries half way through this tour, but you can clearly see our route on the following GPS track mapped onto Google maps right up until the point where the power ran out.

View Larger Map

It was another lovely day out in the mountains.

Twitter  Delicious  Facebook

I came into this winter with a firm plan in mind. I was going to clear all my work out of the way apart from a very small portion and concentrate as closely on skiing as I can. It might be the only winter in my life that I get the chance to do this, and I want to take the opportunity. That’s exactly what’s been happening over the past few weeks, and I can’t remember ever being happier.
Plenty of snow has meant plenty of powder days with friends on the Grande Montets, some pretty hectic crampons-wearing ascents of big mountains to access some amazing ski terrain and everything in between. I’ve been making ski movies with Mark Gear and met his intermediate skier group on the mountain to take a set of course pictures for All Mountain Performance.

Here’s a few photos from touring in the Baron valley the other day. On a perfect sunny day we climbed straight up the face of the mountain above the top of the Damain De Balme ski area in Le Tour, over the top and into the Baron valley. It’s North-Facing and so keeps the powder better. It’s also so difficult to get into that we had the entire valley to ourselves, with only 8 other skiers having been down before us. Fresh powder tracks for literally miles. Bit of a James Bond 5km bush-whack out at the end to Trient in Switzerland to catch the bus back to France. Ski touring at it’s best, it was a very good day.

Having friends staying for the past week has meant my office is in use as a bedroom which has further distanced me from my work. The four of us have literally been skiing all day, and playing Family Ski on the Wii in the evenings. It’s all about skiing right now and I’ve got the tan to prove it.

Twitter  Delicious  Facebook

I haven’t posted recently, mainly because my interweb connection has been down for a few days. I was starting to get quite annoyed about not having it. Annoyed enough even to be on the verge of calling up Orange and giving them some grief. Then this morning I discovered what the problem was. I’d plugged a phone into a wall socket to check the line a while ago and the cat had knocked it off the side, leaving it off the hook. It connected immediately as soon as I unplugged the damn phone. Duh.

Not having interweb was the main reason for my lack of posts, but the other reason was tat I had my first house guest staying with me. My very good friend, Phil flew back from the UK with me last week and we’ve been out skiing for a few days. We had a great mix of different kinds of skiing: Knee deep powder on GM, some ski touring in Les Contamines and even a taste of ‘if you fall, you die skiing’ off the very top ‘Arp‘ bubble in Courmayeur.

I’ve got a couple of busy days coming up in the run up to the 25th. I’ve got quite a few people coming over for Christmas dinner in a few days time and I need to pick up the goose & do some shopping for that. Also Sarah comes back on Wednesday and moves into her brand new house (which she’s never seen before). I’m actually feeling quite excited about Christmas now, which is unusual for me.

Twitter  Delicious  Facebook