Chamonix Snow Report: 5th January 2014

Although Saturday at Flegere gave us some good off piste powder, the visibilty was pretty rubbish, but that's because it was snowing lots up up there (although sadly it was raining most of the day in town #shouldhavebeenupthemountain!). The Chavannes chair was shut on both days this weekend although oddly there was still music pumping out inside, so were were drawn like moths to a flame or more like tired people in need of a deck chair and a liquid refreshment.. to no avail. The doors were shut and there wasn't a deck chair in sight :-(

Riding in poor visibility can only be sustained for so long, and since our plans for a sit down at La Chavanne were scuppered, a friend and I decided a bit of transceiver training was in order. We spent an hour or so burying and re-burying a backpack with a transceiver inside, and digging fake burial sites in the sides of one of the green pistes to test our search and retrieval skills. It's well worth brushing up on your skills from time to time, or joining one of the courses or lectures offered by the Avalanche Academy, and more so at the moment with such a reportedly unstable snow pack.

The snow kept coming overnight and on Sunday morning a deceptive inversion hung over the valley. Once we'd arrived at Grands Montets car park though, we could see the sunshine starting to poke through the clouds and that the mid station appeared to be surrounded by bright blue skies... we were thinking it might be a nice afternoon i.e. better than Saturday, but a BLUE SKY POWDER DAY?!?!?! Bonus.

I won't bang on about this for too long, much as I'd like to.. but the snow was pretty darn amazing! The Lavancher bowl was just epic over & over again, and the Herse chair gave more of the same.. deep, deep snow all over the place (although annoying with rocks lurking just below the surafce in some places off the Herse, so you never really felt like you could let off the gas all together).

Take a look at Ed's video from the top of Grands Montets along the side of the glacier.. more amazing conditions up there, face shots all round, and an interesting technique by Andy showing how (not to?) get out of deep snow on a board if you get stuck :-p