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Chamonix Snow Report: 31st March 2009

featured in Snow report Author Tom Wilson-North, Updated

For a lot of people, the die is cast. It's practically April...people consider skiing out-of-season to be like surfing in mid-winter or playing conkers in the Spring. I decided to take a whistle-stop tour around the Chamonix Valley today to find out if it was all over, if skiing was done and nothing but slush and forlorn rocks poking through.

Today, I found that this was not the case. At all.

The winter of 2008-9 has been considered to be a particularly snowy, cold one. Even though this isn't strictly true (as I found out recently), there's still plenty of snowbase. And in other particularly good news, the top few layers of snow, deposited during the warm storm system that came in over the weekend, felt great. Being hidden in the clouds, away from the transformative effects of 36 hours of sunshine, has kept the snow lovely.

We started out at Brevent early this morning, a really tight-knit little group of seasoned skiers and snowboarders and headed to Planpraz on the new gondola (NB: I ought to stop saying 'new' really, as the lift is entering its fifth month of admirable service). Once at Planprtz, at 2000m, we jumped on the Brevent cable car which goes to the very top of the resort at 2525m.

There was no queue - just relaxed, friendly lifties enjoying the low visitor numbers in the low season. Heading to the top, to the dismay of my friends, I started talking a little faster than usual to take my vertigious mind off the substantial amount of air between the cable car and the rock below. That still haunts me even after years of taking the lift!

Once at the Brevent, we buckled up and headed straight for the Hotel Face. The Hotel Face - referred to in the guidebooks by its French name, the Pente de l'Hotel - is the large and obvious off-piste powder face that dominates the Brevent ski area. It requires a bit of tricky traversing on skis and snowboarders will be bootpacking to get to the good bits.

On the traverse on the way over, I felt my black jacket absorbing the sun's rays and getting warm to the touch. We knew we had to drop into the slope fast, before the snow could melt significantly enough to destabilise and slide.

Arriving at the line, we assessed the slope and dropped in, skiing carefully, one by one. The snow was still fresh powder, although rather wet and was sweating beads of water in the sunshine. Every turn I made sent a layer of surface sluff riding down the face, not an avalanche, but still a thin band of moving snow and although the slope was untouched when we rode it, after four people had ridden it, most of the snow had slipped back down towards the bottom. Exiting the slope fast, we bombed down the fresh courduroy-like piste to quickly spin another lap on a shaded aspect of the same area.

By 10.30am the snow was really getting heavy and the potential consequences of an avalanche getting more and more severe. In a deep, fast moving, wet slab avalanche a transceiver is little more than a fashion accessory when you consider the forces that a slide like these can generate. So, we bailed and headed to the higher, easterly-facing Les Grands Montets to check out what was happening there.

After a quick run through the Les Grands Montets snow park (regular readers will know of my penchant for riding freestyle on a snowboard, although I'm far too old for that kind of rubbish really). We then waited 20 minutes in the queue for a Top Ticket to whisk us to 3233m.

Once up there, we saw that although the snow was better quality - lighter and drier than at Brevent - it was a lot more tracked out. We resorted to semi-desperate measures to get a few turns in.

The line we were headed to is known as the Ligne des Pisteurs as it's accessed via a very narrow, exposed, sketchy walk along a fence to where patrollers throw explosives to release unstable snow. It starts off with having to hop over the railings of the Grands Montets viewing platform, a bit of a crowd-pleaser for the sightseers up there. The access is like a narrower, sketchier version of the walk down the arête to the Vallée Blanche at the Aiguille du Midi and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hanging on for dear life most of the way down the walk and steel ladder.

Once into the line however, the snow was fantastic - if a little wind-affected - and we extended our route into the Droit du Rognan descent onto the Argentiere glacier.

Back down here at valley level, I'm in shorts. It feels surreal to have been skiing powder this morning. The white snowdrops and purple gentianes have injected some colour into my muddy, grassy post-winter garden and there are streams of mountain bikers passing my house. Only right here, in the world's finest gravity playground, do seasons intermingle like this.

See you out there!


Tom

Stats

Avalanche Risk
  • Level 3

Snow Report
  • 1

  • Total Pistes: 75

  • Alt. Resort: 1972

  • Alt. Summit: 3233

  • Alt. Last Snow: 2800

  • High Temp.: 15

  • Alt. High Temp.: 1050