Schneebericht Chamonix, 17.01.2017

Schneelage

The weather arrived: a series of storms over a week-long period dropped roughly 10cm, then 40cm, then another 30cm with barely any winds. A blanket covering all the way down to the valley meant that most of the sharks had finally been buried, but often not deep enough, and hundreds of tiny pieces of P-tex were scraped off and scattered across the hillside.But at least there is now snow down to the valley, and with temperatures set to remain cold, we might finally have been given a good base to build on for the rest of the season. Most lifts and pistes at all of the ski stations are now open except for weather-related closures, even the runs coming back down to the valley, and there is favourable coverage on all of the major ski touring routes, although it is still advised to walk the final sections of some of the forest tracks, such as the Berard Valley, the Loriaz tracks, the bottom of the descent from the Glacier du Tour and the Col du Passon, and the James Bond Trail from the Vallee Blanche.Up high, many of the crevasses are, in general, quite well-covered, but there are still problems on the lower-reaches of the glacier routes, with the exit from the Argentiere Glacier still a little "sporty" in places, and the Vallee Blanche requiring a little more in the way of genuine ski mountaineering, with many parties skiing the heavily-crevassed Salle a Manger roped-up.

Schneequalität

Yes, we were given an awful lot of snow in a few glorious days, but then disaster struck with the arrival of gale-force winds, once at the weekend and again on Monday and into Tuesday, stripping some things bare and dumping a thick layer of windslab over almost every aspect at worst, or just leaving a mixed-bag of unpredictable conditions at best. Some pockets of powder can be found in the most protected of places, but you kind of get the feeling that all of the best pictures on The Social Media have been staged.At the moment, we have slab, crust, concrete... and the occasional patch of soft snow if you are lucky.

After a few scary days with the rating at 4/5, we've now settled back to 2/5 below 2200m, and 3/5 above. Swirling winds, predominantly north-westerlies at first but swinging round to easterlies as the week continued, have left slab of varying thickness on many different aspects. I've seen spontaneous releases on south-east faces, and I've heard reports of similar on north-east. I got turned around today by the presence of thick slab in a south-west facing couloir, but another team skied a different south-west couloir and found heavy snow, but safe enough. It's tricky to predict, to be honest, and given the shitty snow you are likely to find anyway, I don't think I'm going to bother until there's a bit of a change in conditions.

Gesamteindruck

In December, whilst looking for soft snow, I found a little couloir that people hardly ever ski, just because it's a bit of a hassle to get into. The snow wasn't great, but I decided it would definitely be worth going back for in the future, so today I took a punt and went to have another look. We skinned up the Argentiere Glacier, over the moraine path, up through barely-covered granite slabs, up an access couloir, over a rock step, and finally, into the base of the couloir.Instead of settled, sheltered, nipple-deep snow, we found a single patch of pretty thick soft slab, ten metres wide, 300m long. This couloir will not be skied today. We rappelled back over the rock step, clipped into our skis, and wrestled our way back down through crust and crud, with one short section of beautifully-textured ice cream.Excellent exercise, and a pleasure to be outside. But certainly no trophies today.