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!!