Coming Soon

Coming Soon, Courmayeur 2007 and Eurotrashed will present their first ever photo annual, with photos! It will be spectacular, with photographers from all over Entreves, Italy, weighing in with their contributions. All photos will be selected by a jury of our peers. Everyone who lives at 14 Rue Colle del Gigante will have a chance to vote, probably more than once. Be sure to check back, as I'm sure we'll be putting it up soon-ish.

Russ, I'll e-mail you the photos soon, probably.

Green and Gray

Those seem to be the colors of Courmayeur right now, not surprising given the season. It wouldn’t be any different at home in Vermont. Yet somehow it caught me by surprise, mostly, I think, because I have been so accustomed to shockingly blue skies and stark white mountains framed beneath them. Lately the mountains have lost their mantle and started turning new-life green, slowly at first but lately with a more powerful insistence. Entreves, where we live, was one of the last strongholds, a fact that we noted with pride while riding down the Mont Blanc tram. It held snow longer than the town of Courmayeur. It also was the last to get significantly green. Now it’s a moot point. The entire valley has given over to the other side, allowing flowers to bloom profusely. As much as I enjoy it, it’s one more reminder that winter is gone.

The gray is another new development. Today it’s raining, not the flirtatious young spring showers of yesterday that teased the sun but a persistent, mature downpour that’s not going to give up until it gets what it wants. From our balcony I can see the river running out of the Val Veny, fed by the Miage and Brenva glaciers, among others. It’s busy moving rocks the size of small houses in it’s rush downhill. The once-snowy chutes across the valley on the side of Mont Chetif, the same chutes we looked at longingly every day from the tram, wondering if they were skiable or not, are long white ribbons of runoff slowly melting away at the avalanche debris piled at the bottom.

Everything is slowly moving downhill, it seems.

Louise and I spent the last few days in Chamonix. While sitting at one of the cafes near the main roundabout in town, we saw more than a few cars with British plates, loaded down like college students after graduation, heading back to their island. Our favorite bar, a shockingly pink art-deco place perched above the Arve river in the center of town, was celebrating its last night, the English waitress told us. Les Grands Montets had their closing party, complete with pond-skimming, and then shut down. Most of the shops had end-of-season sales on just about anything you could want. Snell Sports, the biggest store in Chamonix, had moved all the skis to a miserable little room upstairs from the main floor, climbing rope hung where skis once stood stacked four pairs deep.

Maybe the Chamoniards understand how I’m feeling. In Courmayeur, far fewer do, I’m sure. Far fewer of them know what it means to really live by the seasons. They, like many others, conceptualize seasons as something abstract and economic: winter season in Courmayeur is a time to make money, followed by a spring shutdown and then a brief revival for a couple months of summer. They’re not so much living by the seasons as making a living by the seasons. But I think many of Chamoniards know differently. They know what it is to spend the rest of the year making a living so that they can live by the seasons. Winter’s end for them as well as for me, means one step closer to the return to the quotidian. Many of them will probably put it off and go climbing up high on the massif, as I’m doing, prolonging winter through elevation. But even that can only last so long before inevitable reality sets in. I’ll have to go back to wherever I’m supposed to belong and find something to do with my time, waiting for winter to set in again.

I’ll have to move downhill as well.

Dear Someone,

An open letter to all gear manufacturers.

Yes, in high school I called them label whores, people who proudly wore egregious labels on their clothes. I shunned them. I mocked them. But now I would like to be one.


Dear Black Diamond,
I am willing to overlook the fact that your climbing ski attachment system broke if you send me a pair of Verdicts, size 175 or so. I am not a good telemark skier but I am told that I faceplant like no one else. Maybe your skis would eliminate this, but I think not. Nonetheless this "skill" of mine would be a good selling point. "Who's that guy," people would ask each other, watching me delicately faceflop down a moderately inclined run. They would want to know me, to know how I could withstand such a beating, time and again. They would talk to me and say "Hey, nice skis. Why do you suck so bad?" And I would make mumbled responses through bleeding lips and black eyes but they would notice those skis. You can bank on that, Mr. Black Diamond Rep.

Dear Scarpa and Rottefella, and also Venture Snowboards,
Rottefella, your NTN bindings are great looking in the pictures I have found on the Internet. Finally, no stupid duckbill to get in the way of crampons (number of manufacturers making any sort of adapter for telemark boots that I know of: 1. Way to go Petzl! You can send me some, if you want). Scarpa, your boots look great, judging from the beater pair I saw downstairs in the one telemark shop in Chamonix. The liners looked a little cheesy, but heck, I'd still take a free pair. Here's the kicker, though. I've got a great plan. We already know that I suck at telemark skiing (see post above). So, for the reasons mentioned there, you'd get plenty of exposure through my lack of ability. But think of this: a snowboarder, ripping down Insane Clown Couloir, or something equally rad and sick, bro (pow, gnar - when you're on a bra-speak kick, it's hard to stop) and coming to stop on the glacier below it. He casually reaches down and clicks out of his really cool looking Voile mountain plates mounted to his Venture Divide split board, splits it apart and slaps on his Black Diamond skins and clicks in to the board-cum-skis with his awesome looking orange Scarpa boots on. Later on that day, while casually doing a mellow ice climb called Chips of Fury, he simply leaves his board at the bottom and straps his crampons on, toe and heel bail fitting perfectly, crampon and boot melding together like cheap American cheese on a greasy burger cooked over flames! Rejoice! No more ill-fitting crampon/snowboard boot interface! A real Vibram sole!! Not having to take any shit from elitist skiers about "those comfy little snowboard boots"!!! These are all things that could be real. I've got the plan, I just need the gear. People would be sure to ask questions. Why did you go to all that trouble? Who makes those boots? What kind of system is that? Scarpa, Rottefella, Venture, we could go far. Let's face it, snowboard equipment is still stuck in the adolescent phase. Someone actually tried to sell me a pair of hemp snowboard boots with a "onie" pocket. If you don't know what a "onie" is, talk to your kid's weed dealer. He knows. Snowboarders want crampon-compatible boots with a Vibram sole. They want a splitboard that is light, skins well, and doesn't have traditional strap bindings. We could give them this, guys. I could be the first, unassuming as I am. Don't be afraid to dream, friends. Don't be afraid at all.

Dear EuroSpin of Italy,
You provide such great quanitites of low-quality food at such low prices. I know. I've been eating it for the past two months. And I've grown to love you with all my heart. I'm not asking for much, just a standard sponsorship agreement. I'll proudly wear your colors if you take an additional 25% off your already ridiculously low prices. Also, if you would call me when new shipments of that cheap champagne that I like arrive, that'd be great too.

Why’d you hike up that?

Today we went to Cervinia, which is like Zermatt, but Italian. They have the Matterhorn, all right, but not the view you’d recognize. Pretty nice town, Cervinia, but it’s not quite Zermatt, somehow. Smaller, sure, quieter for certain. Fewer deadly electric cars that sneak up on you like squat pumas, pouncing at the last moment, scattering groups of Japanese tourists like frightened gulls. Seems like most of the Italian ski towns are like that…same mountain as their cross-the-border counterparts without the international fame and recognition. Or the crowds on powder days. Or any days. That must be because they suck. Badly. Don’t come to Italy to ski, even if you lose a bet.

Ironically, even though Cervinia, like all the Italian mountains is totally heinous and virtually unskiable, we managed to find a couple of lines that looked like fun. Surprisingly, there was no lift to the top of them nor even, shockingly, a snack bar once we got to the top. Just a large cylindrical building with what looked like a satellite antenna and four canisters marked “Oxygen” in bold white letters. The cylinder stood sentinel over a large, lonely bowl full of creamy spring corn, finally softened at 12:00 by the oblique rays of the sun. Russ and I stood near the cylinder catching our breath. The south-facing approach had more than softened up by the time we got to it and what looked like easy walking turned out to be 45 minutes or so of thigh-deep postholing followed by desperate scrambling on loose shale. The best part was, we were in full view of the lift attendant who no doubt was thinking “What the hell are they doing?”

Well, we knew what we were doing. Or at least had the confidence that we knew what were doing.

At the top we surveyed the run and watched the chairlift spin in the distance, relishing the fact people were no doubt sitting on the lift, sweat-free and breathing normally, thinking “Why’d you hike up that?”

They’ll probably never know why we hiked up a mostly-melted out ridgeline but 400 vertical meters of creamy turns, a rock drop or two and a tight chute finishing in a series of rollers more than answered the question for us.

Hut Trip, cont.

The hut itself. Yes, that is a glacier in the background.

Skiing is so hard when the snow sucks. Luckily it didn't here. Weeze laying down some pretty tracks.

We all know that skiing makes people tired. It also makes skis tired. These three pair are soaking up some rays and getting ready for tomorrow's turns.

Hut Trip: Elisabetta Soldini Refuge

Before you can play, you have to pay. Weeze, charging it.

More Payment. Nice scenery, but gosh, so many ski tracks!

Play time. We barely managed to find this stash of fresh snow. There were only 1,209,234,235 more like it.

Cold smoke with no helicopters anywhere in sight. Russ getting down.

Do you have it?

Anyone who has ever ski-bummed, or even anyone who has lived in an area where skiing is the primary winter activity has heard this term. Towards the end of the season it creeps up on nearly everyone, slowly, naggingly, until it’s presence is as palpable as the stench emanating from the long underwear drawer. It shortens days on the mountain, prompting otherwise zealous skiers into calling it quits after only a few runs. It has nothing directly to do with the weather, the snow, or muscle fatigue but it is absolutely indirectly related to all those things. A different form of it can be seen in marathon runners who, having focused their energy for months and months on a specifics 26.2 mile goal suddenly find themselves burning their running shoes the day after the race and wondering what it would be like to take up shuffleboard instead.

It’s called ski-sickness and I might have it.

Ski-sickness is an awful condition because it puts you into a complicated situation, one that is difficult to explain to someone.

“Yeah,” you say, “I’m just tired of having fun skiing.”

Your friends look at you as if you had just sprouted another head. “Right,” they intone slowly, “you’re tired of an activity that consumes the thoughts of a good portion of the population during their working hours in the winter, an activity that spurs them to work extra hours to earn vacation time and extra money to buy lift passes, clothes, gear, rent condos, and travel all over the world. You’ve had enough? Must be rough.”

Surprisingly, it is. For the past five months it’s all I’ve done. I skinned up the barely snow covered trails at Stowe for the privilege of sliding down a fairly awful mixture of grass, rocks, and wind crust that left me wondering what the hell I was doing. But I knew that it was fun and, lacking the motivation to find what people in my peer group call a real job, I made it my purpose. I scratched my way down the early season snow at Stowe, one trail of man-made blue-and-icy snow on my telemark skis, dreaming of the day when it would be powdery instead of icy, dreaming of a time when I would be somewhat proficient in my turns instead of sliding awkwardly around with one ski weighted and the other doing a poor imitation of an injured bird’s wing dragging along behind. Through the frustration and pain that came with learning to telemark came a certain sense of satisfaction that I was learning something. February came and with it the move to the Italian Alps. Russ hadn’t had too many good reports about the snow here, but this all changed as soon as we arrived. Three feet of fresh snow and a total lack of motivated off-piste skiers was absolute heaven for weeks, it seemed. We were skiing powder almost every day with only a little effort. This, I told myself, was what I had been hoping and preparing for all winter, all through the fall when I ran and rode my bike everyday and did horrible ski-racer exercises that would make my powder turns just that more enjoyable. It seemed as if finally my goals were being achieved, limited as they were.

And then the snow stopped. It rained, blasphemy in the Alps. The Alps, for Chrissakes! It’s not supposed to rain there. On the East coast of the USA, fine, I’ll accept that as part and parcel of the deal, but the Alps? No way. But rain it did, and it stomped our skiing pretty hard. There was still plenty of snow, for the most part, but it wasn’t quite the same. Periodically we’d get little storms that would leave a few inches and we’d ski it for days, finding little powder pockets all throughout the mountains. But it seemed as if the denouement of the season was upon us, the climax reached and surpassed. Now instead of anticipating the next big storm we were grasping at the remnants of old ones come and gone.

With the skiing at the resort growing increasingly mediocre we took a trip up the valley to a hut at the foot of Petit Mont Blanc. On the way up to the hut from the top station at the resort we found great snow and no tracks. The hut itself was anything but basic. We arrived expecting to find a little winter room with some mattresses on the floor, dark and dirty, but out of the wind and weather and easier to carry than a tent. What we found instead was a spacious room with solar-lighting, three levels of bunk beds with mattresses, pillows, and blankets, and a large outdoor patio with benches where we could relax in the sun after skiing. Despite there being 24 beds we were the only ones there and were the only visitors since the beginning of March. To top it all off, the snow around the hut was completely untracked. We spent the next few days putting in skin tracks and reaping the rewards of powder perfect snow from ankle to knee deep on a good solid sun-crust base. Avalanche danger was low on northern aspects and we all felt really strong. Meanwhile we could look down the valley to the resort and the see the resort socked in with dense lead-gray clouds. The morning we left the clouds had moved up the valley to encircle us and the ski out was appropriately somber. We were heading to Sicily with Michela for an Easter vacation, something that all of us were looking forward to with mixed emotions. We knew on some level that this trip marked the end of the season in some way. Sure, we’d ski when we got back, but by that time the tram near our house would be closed so it would mean taking a bus to the main tram every morning. A chapter was definitely coming to a close.

A week in Sicily spent visiting ancient Greek temples and theaters, watching traditional Easter parades in which Sicilian men carry really heavy religious floats around on their shoulders for a full 24 hours, and lounging on the beach and swimming in Mediterranean left us all happy to have been there but equally happy to return to the mountains. In our absence, however, a lot had changed. The tram had closed. The free bus was finished for the season. There was more dirt than snow on the lower parts of the mountain and the snow that was left was like skiing through luke-warm instant mashed potatoes. It was…demoralizing. We tried the glacier the next day, finding that it too had suffered some abuse. The sun had baked it during the Easter vacation week when hordes of Milanese had descended its flanks, digging deep trenches in the sun-baked snow that hardened into deep ruts and ridges. Lower down where the temperatures remained high even at night the snow had become almost consolidated but oddly bottomless so that skis and boards sank deep into it as if the mountain was actively trying to pull you down with every turn.

The feeling of the season had changed. It was tired. It needed a rest. It wanted you to leave it alone.

Weeze and I decided to listen to it, at least for a day. Russ, bolstered by the recent purchase of a used pair of alpine skis, decided to go for it again, skiing the glacier with our Swedish friends, Pelle and Stian. But it left us all with a strange feeling of emptiness, this knowledge that the season was slowly closing in on us. There’s still plenty of snow higher up, there’s still plenty of climbing to do, and the thrill of this place still has us in its thrall. But for the moment we’ve got to get over a little bout of ski-sickness. It’ll probably just be a little 24 hour bug followed by a quick recovery. Skiing’s still fun, after all. But too much of a good thing is still too much.

Yee. Haw.

Okay, this picture is really hard to make out details, but see the big open snow-slope above the traverse? Yeah? There's a little tiny dot at the top. That's me. To the right-hand side of the photo you can see another dot on the traverse. That's Russ. See the lack of tracks on the snow slope? Yay.

See Dana schralp. Schralp Dana schralp. Dana schralped the pow-field. See the pow fly. Fly, pow, fly!

It dumped four inches and we've been skiing it for five days.

The title pretty much says it. The piste skiing is uniformly bad, though the Italian piste-bashers did seem to discover the snow-tiller the other day and ground up some of the ice into ski-able corduroy instead of slick blue ice patches. The downside is that they started making snow again, and leaving blind rollers everywhere, which makes for harrowing rides to the lifts to get to the "slackcountry" terrain that Courmayeur is not famous for.

Russ's brother has been over, and we've been trying our best to show him the goods, but with so little snow, it's been hard. However, we skied the Youla bowl two days in a row and had no trouble grabbing first tracks on a number of lines that people either didn't trust because they looked too rocky (they were, but still more fun than the pistes) or you had to hike ten minutes to get to the top of them. You'll see the pics when I post them. They're awesome. If I can brag.

Another Photo of "Backcountry" Skiing

This is looking down the Canale del Cesso from the top of the Punta Hellbronner lift. The hut is the Torino Refuge. This photo makes me a pucker a bit, but I'd do it again.

This was supposed to go with the blog entry "Italian Planning" but I forgot.

This is the aftermath of a rain on snow event. I am now scared shitless of being in the mountains and getting rain on snowpack. Whoever designed this house obviously didn't care about that too much...sorry about your porch.

Courmayeur Extreme Skiing Fashion

Awesome.

Great.

Yes! The best one yet!!!!
Seriously, this was not an isolated fashion incident. Take note, all of you Stowe skiers from Boston and New York. You've got nothing on Italy.

High-Elevation Lift-Served "Backcountry" Skiing

This is looking down the Canale del Cesso, which means, roughly, the toilet canal. It wasn't shitty. It was steep. Most people do this with a guide, we've heard, but we did it with our skis. It worked out pretty well.

This is Russ, coming out of the Cesso. He's initiating a turn here, just like in all my photos, apparently.

This is Louise, squatting a grump on the Toula glacier. If you don't know what that means, ask a former summer-camp counselor.

Italian Planning is way better than Swiss Planning. Seriously.

When you can't write about how rad you are, or how rad your powder skiing is, then what do you write about? I don't know what the proverbial "you" would do, as I can't speak for that person, or people, whoever they may be. But I can say that I would write about spatial planning. And by would, I mean that's what you're about to read, if you're actually still reading at this point.

Still? Okay.

Courmayeur used to consist of about four lifts, at least according to the old Mont Blanc map hanging in the Ronzani's house. There was the main tram that went from town up to the Plan Checrouit, a smallish flat area at the edge of the steep valley wall. There was a seggiovia, or chairlift, that went up to the Col Checrouit starting a few hundred yards from where the tram let off. From the top of that lift there were two other trams going to the Cresta Youla and the Cresta Arp respectively from where I'm pretty sure no one skied, at least on a regular basis, as there is high avalanche danger pretty much all the time. So essentially Courmayeur was one chairlift, if you consider where most people skiied. Fast forward a few years. Courmayeur is the sexiest resort north of Milan, so the lift society decided to install a few more lifts. Most of them start at Plan Checrouit. Now, instead of one tram and one chair, which has become the world's smallest six person gondola, they've added an eight person gondola from the valley, a double chair, a six-pack chairlift, a magic carpet for the kiddies and the occasional rich divorcee looking to learn how to ski and maybe take the maestro's pants off later, and a Poma. [Sound of incredulous whistle here.] That's a lot of infrastructure to add to an area about the size of two football fields. But wait, there's more. Throw in a couple of bars and restaurants, a ski rental shop, and something that looks like an ice-fishing shack from Lake Champlain that sells cocktails and french fries (for the Brits, I think). In short, pretty much anything you could want is right there. The Courmayeur resort management, realizing that everyone would eventually end up right there, hired someone to plan out skier-traffic flows and the like. This person decided that the best way to slow people down in the area would be to bottleneck everything into the smallest possible area. The result is a 75 to 100 meter wide trail suddenly narrowing to 10 meters with Caution! Slow! signs creating three distinct channels that funnel into a narrow area between two buildings where people congregate to buy tickets, meet instructors, rent skis, wear things made of fur, and eat french fries. Usually, on a good day, there's a six foot wide corridor between ever-shuffling bodies in which to ski to get to the gondola, the double, the six-pack, as well as the tram and the gondola to the valley. To be honest, I'm more afraid of the Plan Checrouit area than I am of avalanches because with avalanches I can control my exposure. Also, you're not allowed to use your shovel to dig out of the Plan Checrouit. The Polizia, who patrol the area in randonnee boots, would get pissed.

But it's okay, really. It would be really bad if the people who came to Courmayeur coudn't ski, if they panicked as soon as they saw the Slow! signs and threw on the brakes, curving in wild arcs across the entire piste concentrating their entire visual range on the tips of their skis without looking around for anyone else. Now that would be harrowing.

This is Russ' Blog

Courmayeur 2007

This is Russ' blog. He's been lazy lately, but his blog is about the same stuff as mine but funnier, with a lot more wit. Lucky you saw mine first so the bar was pretty low in terms of judgment. Once you see his, I'm ruined.

These Pictures are so Sweet

This is lunch pretty much every sunny day. No hats, gloves, t-shirts, lots of sun, and hot ski bunnies. It's like Hot Dog in Italy.

This is part of Entreves. It's a shame the skiing is so good and the town is so ugly.

Global Climate Change and You, Bub.

Yep, global climate change exists and it makes for really good spring skiing conditions which, at the end of February, are disconcerting at best. For the past four days the sky has done nothing but dump precipitation in some form. The first three days were snow, heavy, wet flakes that plastered everything around. That was great. Weeze and I went out on Monday in an almost total whiteout and skied the best lines either one of us has seen in a long time. I didn't really know what a real faceshot felt like till then and with this snow, you felt it. Instead of some dried out Utah blower with a 0.005% water content, this stuff was up around 25%. When it hit, it felt like a welterweight landing one on your kisser. There were definitely times I wished for a snorkel and a couple of times where I misjudged my line and ended up on a flat spot, wishing for the flippers to go along with it. At the top of Courmayeur's only six-pack, we met up with Mike Mallet, a guy that I used to know in college. He was randomly in Courmayeur on a vacation with some friends, who were at a meeting of some sort. So he tagged along with us, after we figured out how we knew each other. We pretty much used him as a guinea pig, albeit a willing one, to see if certain lines would go or not. Skiing on someone else's gear, Mallet sent billy-goaters that would have made me pucker a little bit. We skied until the lifts closed that day, vowing to get out early the next day with Russ, Michela, Adam, and Hannah.

Tuesday looked great as we took off and caught the first tram ride up. Dropping into a short tree line on the way to the Zerotta lift, we got some great tracks, although the trees looked like they had been skied the day before...hmmm. Euros, skiing trees? Were there some Swedes lurking about? Louise and I had met some the day before who said they loved the powder, but they were both skiing on Volkl frontside skis, not really the type of people you'd expect to snake your line in the trees. We skied some pretty obvious stuff on the frontside, getting a few first tracks but it looked like there had been some strange amount of "fuori piste" action. Who the hell was skiing it? What about the magic invisible line drawn at the edge of the piste that no Euro, except maybe some Swedes and a few Italians or French guys would cross. It seemed as if someone had blurred that line a little bit although, I had to remind myself, back home, the tracks we were getting at 12:00 would have been gone by 10:00...the day before. Maybe I am getting a little too Eurotrashed...

At lunch we decided to rough it and picnic out in the sun at one of the approximately 8 billion restaurants on the slopes. Russ chatted up the bartender and got us some free sandwiches to go along with our carafe of wine, which seems like a great idea at lunch but at 2500 meters altitude after skiing hard all morning hits like a brick about an hour afterwards. During lunch we noticed that the Gabba lift was open. The Gabba, at least during the last storm, was a bastion of incredible snow, starting with wide-open, low-angle bowls that feed into some of the steepest, most widely-spaced tree skiing I’ve ever seen. Best of all, no one was mining it, especially the tighter lines. Let me just say that by “tighter” I mean that you sometimes had to duck to get under branches or throw in a quick, controlled turn rather than lazily arcing through the conifers. Not tight like East Coasters mean tight, where you actually have to carry a machete with you to open up a path before you ski it. This storm, however, proved to be a different beast altogether. With a little bit of a base, brought by the previous week’s storm, some of the locals had gotten a lot ballsier and there were way more tracks than we thought there would be. We still found plenty of fresh tracks and snaked more than a few lines, but all in all it seemed as if the skiers had woken up a little.

At the end of the day something strange started to happen. The clouds started to build up over the Mont Blanc massif and rolled languidly over to the Courmayeur area, dropping little white chunks of…hail. What the hell? Hail only occurs on the East Coast, right? In January? (And December, February, March, and April. And November, too.) So what was hail doing here? By the time we took the trail back down to Entreves, it was looking like rain. By the time we got to the house, it felt like rain. And it rained all night long. We got up late the next morning and called up the Courmayeur ticket office lady who, contrary to ski industry standards, decided to tell us the truth. Apparently it had rained all night, even up high on the Col Checrouit. We decided, since our passes are good for more than one mountain in the Aosta Valley, that we should check it out. La Thuile, straddling the Italo-French border, seemed like a good choice since it’s about 500 meters higher than Courmayeur, on average. We called them up and were told that it had been snowing all night. So a quick, free bus ride later, we got there to find out that it had indeed been snowing all night. And that virtually every lift was on wind-hold. And had been all day. Oops. The La Thuile lady must have forgotten that little bit. Well, we were already there, so we figured we’d ski what was open, which was two Pomas and a quad which were all about 2000 meters long with an average vertical rise of 50 meters. La Thuile is a huge plateau, broken by a few small ridges, which did look like they had a few good runs on them. But unfortunately there were closed due to wind, so we ended up skiing a FIS homologated downhill trail all afternoon with everyone else on the mountain, which was a very convivial experience, dodging slush bumps, the S of death, and a few random packs of snowboarding Swedes, intent of throwing 360s of everything.

When we got home, the rain had started again, crushing the snow in the valley into little bumps scattered along the sides of the road. It didn’t look like we had lost that much snow, but it was more the insult that the rain brought than the injury. In the Alps, of all places, the hallowed birthplace of skiing and virtually all snowsports, rain during the winter is like farting in Church That’s a capital C, incidently, for Catholic, and farting in Catholic church is way worse than farting in some upstart Protestant institution.

Today, as luck would have it, Russ, Michela, Adam, and Hannah all left to go to Milan and then on to Venice, so the snow gods Ullr and Nale, sensing Russ’ imminent departure, unleashed the floodgates. The snow is coming down again and Weeze and I are looking forward to some more powder skiing tomorrow. Thanks, Russ!!

Photos, Sponsorship, and Text-Messaging

Well, with no real job, a pulled groin muscle, and therefore lots of free time, I decided to play with some photos. What you see below is the result of hours and hours of time spent in the darkroom, constantly readjusting hues and saturation, exposure times, and filters to get everything just right. Actually, I just photoshopped a lot of it. Thanks Adobe. You guys are great. You should sponsor me or something.

Meanwhile, while I've been playing with photos, it's been dumping. Down low in the valley we've had about 8 inches, which is approximately god only knows what in centimeters. 20 centimeters? Sounds about right. In any case, it was a fat, wet snow, the kind that drapes itself over the landscape in a sopping white blanket. We went up on the hill the other day to check it out, but with zero visibility, a good layer of hardpacked ice underneath the wet bumps, and more Brits on vacation than you would even want to shake a stick at, it wasn't worth staying too long. I also managed, somehow, to pull a groin muscle. I wish I could say it was something extreme but I think it happened when I was running up some stairs to get breakfast a couple of mornings ago. So tele-skiing's out for the moment and the board is in. Which is fine with me, as I think the snow up high will be pretty grabby and probably pretty deep in places. This storm also fell straight down with virtually no wind, directly on to a surface hoar layer which had formed over the past few days and cold nights. For those of you who don't really get into discussions of avalanches and snow conditions beyond "Snow is cold and white," surface hoar looks like little tiny feathers of frost that grow up from the surface of the snow when the nights are cold and windless. It looks really pretty, twinkling in the sun and sounds neat when you ski through it, like thousands of little crystals falling over themselves down the mountain. They're also pretty dangerous because when new snow falls on them, it usually tends to sit on top of all the little pretty crystals, if the wind hasn't knocked them down, and forms a nice little layer that will collapse if enough force is applied to it. And when they collapse, whatever is on top of them soon finds itself hurtling down the hill in an avalanche. Hmmm...surface hoar sucks. So the next few days will be a little cautious as we see how this storm adds itself to the current snowpack.

Meanwhile, we're waiting for Russ and Michela and Adam and Hannah, who are currently on a grand tour of Italy, to come back to Courmayeur so that we can ski with reckless abandon. It was during this tour of Italy that Louise and I discovered that Russ has somehow made a deal with Ullr, the Norwegian god of snow, and Nale, the boozy Middlebury College Ski Patrol invented goddess of snow that works in the opposite fashion of what you might expect. It seems that the farther away from the mountains he goes, the more snow they get. Case in point: Russ and Michela went to London to visit a friend. While they were away, it snowed about two and half feet, which is a lot even in metric units! While he was here, nothing happened in terms of snow. As Russ prepared to leave, reports started coming in of a possible storm system headed our way. Even MeteoFrance, a known bastion of socialist meteorologists, predicted this. Sure enough, it started snowing the day after he left. The farther away he got, the harder it snowed. I know this because we text-messaged each other throughout the duration. The messages were something like this:

dana: we talked to jean-lucca today he said 60 cm possible by sun night

russ: that would be absurd. i am seeing only light snow tomorrow and sunday. keep me posted.

dana: ill check meteo france for mont blanc and keep you up to date

dana: meteo france says only a little but its dumping right now hard

russ: am i far enough away yet? i hate u guys...

dana: its still snowing hard

russ: i'm about as far away as i will get, give me a report. by the way, the tower is still leaning.

dana: damn italian tower architects. yes, it is still snowing...hard

(By the way, until this trip, I never used text messaging so it took me approximately ten minutes to find the period symbol on my phone.)

I haven't heard anything from Russ yet, but I'm assuming that he's getting closer to Courmayeur as the snow has stopped for the moment.

The next few days will be interesting as we ski this storm, most likely by ourselves in the trees and open slopes. The weather forecast is predicting clouds, which rules out 95% of Italians, the British holidays are over, which rules out 99% of the Brits, and the Maestri di Sci won't ski it unless they are with a guide, wearing a harness with a single 22 cm ice screw dangling from the gear loop, which seems to be the preferred method of anchoring one's self to snow around here. Good luck, fellas. You're gonna need it.

I'll work for Backcountry, too

These are the rest of the pictures. I'm apparently a techno-jackass.

Weeze, about to make some turns on the lower Youla bowl. Notice the Salomon logo? Yep, sponsor her too...

This is the Fauteuil des Allemands. That means "German Couch" in Anglo-talk. Why they call it that, I don't know. Not even beer-swilling Bavarians are that big.

I forget what this peak is called, but it's big and pretty. The trees show that I am artistic as well.

Powder Magazine, give me a job.

These are the first photos in this series, 'cause I can't seem to post more than four at a time...hmmm.

Touring up into the Val Veny with the Pyramide Calcaire in the background. The shaded slope is a future project...

This Russ, coming out of the first gully in the Youla bowl. He's skiing on K2 skis with Garmont boots, in a Mountain Hardwear jacket and North Face pants. Reps, want to sponsor him? Anyone?

Russ, dropping the knee and getting 'er done.

Coming in for a landing. You can't see it here, but his poles are pink.

My life is a big cliche

Weeze and I live in Italy. At least temporarily, that is. So what else would you do with some free time than make your own pasta? That's a rhetorical question, so don't think too hard trying to answer it. Please.

Anyway, Russ told us that it was easy to do. I think that one of the reasons it was easy to do is because of the measuring system. Italians use this crazy system called 'metric' which is based on something logical, like the distance light can travel in a void in some absurdly small amount of time, instead of the size of Prince So-and-So's thumb at the time of his entrance into adulthood, or whatever the American system is based on. And then, using this logical (and repeatable!) basis, they divide it into tens, and permutations thereof which was about the only division problem I could solve until 5th grade or so.What do we Americans divide things into? 12, 4, 5,218, etc. Perfectly easy to remember. 5 points for anyone who can tell me what a furlong is. 10 for anyone who can tell me what an acre is based on. Click comment on the bottom of this blog entry to enter the contest. The reward and recognition will be worth it by far. In any case, pasta is absurdly easy to make. Just remember that you use one egg to every 100 grams of flour. For every three eggs, use one half eggshell of water (or oil, depending on which Italian grandmother is giving you the recipe). Then mix it up till it gets good and doughy and roll it out with a pasta roller or a rolling pin, fold it over itself a few times, and then cut it into whatever shapes you want. Simple, if you have a nice little scale in grams, which in America only exists in high school science labs, waiting to be stolen by the local pot dealer so he can accurately measure the amount of weed he stole from your friend's father's crop...okay, maybe only in my high school. But most of us don't have the luxury of one of these scales, so we have to rely on Google to convert grams to cups, or ounces. And by this time, booting up the computer, going to Google, entering all those numbers, well...you could probably just buy some Buitoni and not worry about it at all. Damn metric system, anyway.

But our pasta was good, by first-time American standards. I was going to make an analogy to losing your virginity and first-times and quality, which you can probably fill in from here, but this is a family blog, dammit. Suffice to say, we liked it, but were glad at the same time that Michela and Russ, who are both really good at cooking Italian food, weren't there to witness the entire process. It probably looked a lot like people from the Midwest trying to eat a Maine lobster, or me trying to eat an armadillo, which I've heard is possible.

After the post-dinner food coma sunk in, we decided to watch Gladiator, a quality film that plays fast and loose with such things as 'facts,' 'history,' and 'melodrama.' But it's about Italy, sort of, and so it's appropriate to talk about, I guess. Really, I have very little else to say, but I didn't want to disappoint you, 'cause chances are good you're at your job, pretending to work by G-Mail chatting with someone, and this blog is a pretty good diversion that your boss might not be able to distinguish from real work. Brief tangent aside, Gladiator got me to thinking. Italy, or at least the Romans, built a super impressive civilization, committed some major atrocities, gave us a pretty good model of governance, at least in theory, and built some of the greatest architectural wonders the world will ever see. And then the whole she-bang collapsed on itself for reasons that have inspired thousands of Ph.D theses and Italy, as we know it now, is a sort of anomaly in Europe. They've got all the outward trappings of the other countries in the EU, like trains, social welfare, and excessively good pastries, but none of the attitude, the holier-than-thou, our-system-will-kick-your-system's-ass mentality. They take the time to enjoy the day, smoke a cigarette, drink a coffee, buy some really high leather boots, what have you. They're fun. They're like you're friend who doesn't have a job, who just skis all the time, doesn't have prospects, etc. No wonder I feel at home here.

It make me wonder if any other former empire nations will becomg like the Italians in a few years. I'd love to see the Brits take themselves less seriously, relax, develop a better cuisine, take the entire month of August off to go to the beach. Or maybe, in a long, long time, us Americans will stop being afraid of everything, stop selling guns to people who then shoot the people we're trying to protect, and just calm down, take a deep breath, and step back. If only we hadn't outlawed lead plumbing and incest, I'm sure the whole process would be sped along nicely.

Well, from pasta to cultural politics, that got involved. Meanwhile, Louise and I ski pretty much all day, everyday. It's ten days since the last storm ended and we're still getting lift-accessed fresh tracks, with more snow on the way in the next few days, says local freeride guru Jean-Lucca. Somewhere around 60 centimeters. Quick, how many feet is that?

By the way, this is how we get Wi-Fi access. We wander around Entreves or Courmayeur until we find a nice little spot, like this, and then we steal all the time we can. No one's yelled at us. Yet.

The Pics that got away...

Russ, schralping the back bowl with style.

This is the Canalone di Dolonne with our line in black. Pretty much the easiest to get to. The upper drainage is accessed from the highest lift and looks like a lot of fun. Only about a dozen tracks coming out of it. Gotta get a guide, man, before you go "fuori piste."

Apres-ski, Courmayeur style. Machiatto, chocolate crepes, and Fanta. Life is rough.

Some Nice Mountain Pictures

This is the back bowl, you can see the second highest lift building in the middle of the photo. All the chutes you can see will go with another storm. We've skied the first two big ones, the four smaller ones on the left are a bit wind-scoured.

This looks really extreme, but it's actually prett low in the Val Veny. We toured up to check out the "Zona Vietata," or Forbidden Zone. They only say you'll be arrested if you go there, but not why, so we had to find out why. Not many lines will go safely, so we'll leave it alone.

Runout of the back bowl...a week after the storm. Looking good...

Schussing with style, on a belly full of tartiflette.