Snow report Pitztal, 01/14/2018

Snow condition

Just enough for the tours. The forest road has enough snow. However, there was an avalanche that had to be crossed several times, which was tricky. Once we avoided it on the summer trail, where we had to walk carefully due to the bare ice, and there were also some slopes in the open ski area where we hit rocks and had to ski carefully. On about half of the slopes, however, there was a load-bearing layer of harsh snow under the powder, where you could really step on the gas. I can't say that the snow conditions depend on the exposure, it seems to depend mainly on the wind and the terrain.

Snow quality

In the hilly terrain to the Lehnerjoch there was a constant change between hard snow, broken hard snow and powder, and on the southern slopes to the Schafhimmel there was also a constant change between powder with and without a lid. It wasn't perfect but it was really good :-)

We found the snowpack to be stable and could not observe any signs of danger. A profile just below the Schafhimmel on the south side showed a crusty layer of old snow, but the block was not triggerable. Overall, it was interesting to see that there were no gliding snow slides in this region. On the way home, I saw that even on the steep grassy slopes of the Bleispitze above Bichlbächle, only a small slide was visible. A completely different picture in this respect than in the Allgäu at the moment!

Overall impression

Subjective 4 stars! We met exactly two other tourers, did everything ourselves and skied some really
beautiful variants. Yesterday was the first time this winter that I climbed over 2000 vertical meters and then two three-thousanders :-)