Winners! great snow in Courmayeur!

I think this shot sums up our day nicely, Mark nears the top of the short hike up to access the variant on our Dolonne descent.

We won the golden ticket today, the prize an amazing days Off piste riding in Courmayeur under endless blue skies!

A couple of big runs off the Arp, the 1st down into the Val Veni, the 2nd down the Dolonne. The Snow was super cold, light and mainly untracked. The top Val Veni bowl had maybe a dozen tracks in it. the Bowl is about 800m wide so a dozen tracks means plenty of fresh left for all, especially as they were ski tracks and so had obviously all taken the same line and stayed real close together. Big Grins and that was only the very start of the run which was pretty good fun all the way down.

After the compulsory Pizza lunch we headed back up for a quick one down the Dolonne, again off the Arp. Again we had freshies most of the way taking a slight variant at the top with a small hike up to access a steeper and more direct entry to the first bowl. Good snow all the way to the valley, a good long run from the top of the mountain right down to Courmayeur, unbeatable!

Tomorrow we're off up the Grands Montets for some top ticket action and a big descent of the Chamonix classic, Pas du Chervre. The snow off the top is very nice but the glaciers are really open still with massive crevasses everywhere so I wouldn't rush to get out to far just yet. the extra dry summer melted off the perma snow this year and so it'll be some time before there's enough new snow to cover them over and create solid snow bridges. Give it some time!

I'm off to Kashmir in a couple of days, Ruth will be manning the office and holding the fort. I've just updated the courses availability page, most courses are full and the ones with spaces on have mostly only one place left available. We have a new availability on the first Adv BC course (1 to 3 ratio) after a cancellation. This should be a good week of riding, with the smaller ratio we can do some good riding and I'd like to get in some of the classics such as the Cosmique couloir, the South face of the Entreves and if its in condition the Breche Puisseaux in the Periades. Give us a call if you fancy some of that.

I've a few interesting projects in mind for next season, one which you might want to start thinking about is a trip to Krasnaya Polyiana, Russia (where we used to go frequently as a heli trip). KP is going to be hosting the Olympics in 2012 and so has had some major development going on and as such the resort is a lot more extensive now and worth a visit in its own right, there's some amazing freeriding there right off the lifts. Throw in the option of a couple of days heli if the conditions are good and I think this might be worth while a re-visit. Sound interesting? Let us know what you think.

Think also Gulmarg again (already a list of suspects building for this one!) and Greenland, expeditions style! 2011 is already sounding good and 2010 has only just kicked off. great, loads of riding to get on with and exciting trips to plan!

Big day planned for tomorrow so I'm off!

All is good,

Neil.