Liam riding the Evola Glacier on a BC freeride week 2005!Today I headed up the Grands Montets to ride with our 2005 brochure cover star Liam Keeley (pictured above). With a strong foehn wind blowing in the valley it didn't look to nice up the hill and the Grands Montets looked like the logical choice it being slightly more sheltered from these strong South Westerly winds.
It's been snowing quite a bit these last few days but with strong winds so I was pretty interested to see how the conditions were going to be up the hill.
The weather wasn't so bad once we got up and we started out with a few runs on the Bochards piste which was in pretty good condition.
We worked on some technique to begin with and Liam made a few quick adjustments to his riding, changing a couple of technical elements and also concentrating more on his line and the way he looked at and worked with the mountain.
It's pretty important to look at the big picture whilst making slight changes to technical details. There's no point making technical changes to your riding if you don't also look at the effects these changes are going to have or need in terms of changes in your control of line/speed and how you use the mountain (and vice versa!)
We spent a few hours on riding technique before the weather started to come good and we ventured up and off the Hearse lift to check out the Off piste conditions over towards the Italian Bowl. There's still plenty of rocks around but over on the sheltered aspects and in the gullies and bowls the snow was deep and un-tracked.
We found a couple of perfect windlips running down the mountain, looking like perfect curling waves just waiting to be torn apart. I love slashing, carving and sliding the top of windlips and these ones were perfect for airing out of to boardslide on the top to re-entry over and over again, beautiful!
The snow was a bit wind effected but great fun to ride and we had a fantastic days riding!
The Foehn has brought a rapid rise in temperature, -17c yesterday to 0c today! Temperature rises like this really effect the snow pack and can be the cause of some big slab avalanches where the wind has been piling in the snow. The cold temps last week and thin snow cover creates a big temperature gradient in the snow pack and depth and surface hoar crystals grow creating weak layers in the snowpack.
The strong winds then load the snow into the sheltered slopes causing wind slab. If the wind slab sits on top of a weak layer it is highly prone to releasing on mass. At this time of the year lots of these loaded slopes haven't had any traffic and and are still highly unstable so be careful out there!
Having said this, I have just learned of an avalanche at Le Tour yesterday involving a 2 meter slab release in the back bowls just off the Tete du Balme! Check out www.chamonet.com for the full story!
Be careful out there! Give it a couple of days to settle down before venturing too far out there, check the snow pack and watch where you ride!
There is more snow forecast this week so the conditions should be good for the early season courses and if today is anything to go by then its going to be amazing!
All is good, get your fill!
Neil.
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