Sunshine + girls + Valfréjus =

Do I need to add anything to this?? Thanks girls for a nice day of skiing & snowboarding (of yes, I'm finally back on my board again) in the sun! Let's do it again soon!

Ski touring in Maurienne, February 24-25

Finally I have a moment to post some photos from last weekend...

Oh yes, we were a group of 9 people (including the guide) to dare the bad conditions last weekend in the search of some snow. How I happened to be the only women & the only one below 30, I don't know... Anyway, we went to Maurienne, one of the massifs north of Grenoble for 2 days of ski touring.
The first day, we actually had some sunshine climbing up to the Col de Rosoire (3023m). However, the conditions got worse during the day, and by the time we reached the mountain hut at 2511m the visibility was pretty bad (I guess this was partly due to the late hour as well...) and the wind was picking up.

Day 1
On my way up to Col de Rosoire - we could definitely use some more snow around here...


The mountain hut is close, just a few more meters to climb and then we're there




"Apero-time" while waiting that the snow for cooking water melts on the fire





After a rather restless night in the cute "Refuge de la Dent Parrachée", we woke up in a full snow storm! During the whole climb up towards Col de Labby (3328m) we were doubting that we would actually be able to reach the mountain pass to ski down on the other side. This was partly due to the bad weather conditions - hard wind & bad visibility because of the heavy snow fall - and partly due to the increasing avalanche risk.
At the end of the day, we made it to the top thanks to a moment of better visibility and the motivation of the group. On the other side, heaven was waiting ;-)) Fresh snow up to my thighs on the top - I honestly did not expect to ski in such snow conditions this year! And the difference in altitude to the village where we had parked the car was 2000 meters... The ride down was an adventure though, as we had some parts with very bad visibility where we knew that the slopes above us were very steep and potentially dangerous in terms of avalanches. This aside, I had one of my best days skiing ever - might be due to the fact that there's been so little snow this year ;-)

Day 2

Preparing for departure - in the snow storm







Some of the best moments of the weekend besides the skiing, were definitely when we saw an ibex climb from one rock to the other close to where we were hiking up the first day, and when several herds of a few dozen chamois crossed our path the following day. One of them even jumped out straight in front of us - from several meters up - when we were skiing down a narrow, steep part! Amazing to see the agility of these animals up close!! I wonder if anybody of us would have been able to pull off a similar jump ;-)