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!!