Snow report Valle D'Aosta, 03/01/2014

Snow condition

Still top. The 30 - 50 cm of fresh snow that has been constantly falling here every week recently leaves nothing to be desired in terms of snow conditions.

Snow quality

There has been around 30 cm of fresh snow over the last two days. Almost no wind influence and still without a crust, but the fresh snow is no longer super fluffy, instead it has already settled a bit and warmed up quite a bit during the morning with the sunlight. 'Only' 3 stars, also because with all the small and medium-sized avalanches you really had to search for slopes that hadn't slipped.

Very tense. In all exposures of the ski area (NW-N-E), numerous small slides or even medium-sized snow slabs have actually slid down, some of them blown up, some of them naturally (today and yesterday) and today a few smaller slabs were also triggered by skiers, especially above 2400 meters. For the most part, 'only' the fresh snow has come down as an avalanche, without old drift snow. I have rarely seen such a poor connection between old snow cover and fresh snow. According to the LLb, level 3 was indicated, but in the neighboring valley of Cogne it was already a 4. With what was previously classified as a 3, it would probably have been possible to go one level higher today, but the size of the expected avalanches in the central Aosta Valley was probably too small for this.

Overall impression

In the morning, quite good for freeriding. Then I didn't feel like queuing at the lift with the school vacation tourists any more and preferred to sit in the sun with a Pepsi in relative safety in the valley rather than continue testing my avalanche management on the mountain.