This past week’s weather can be summarized as unpredictable even for the weather service forecasts. The key was that you could get very good skiing if you got out there even when it looked bad and you’re thinking, “this is not going to be a very good day’s skiing!”. When people asked me if the skiing was going to be good the following day, I should have just said yes, yes and yes. Because there was enough new snowfall in each little storm that when the sun came out from behind the clouds for the odd brief spell, the skiing was great! Even when you couldn’t see much, the snow was very nice a lot of the time (unless you were on a steep south facing slope and dealing with the old crust underneath). The only problem was that you never really new when the snow-showers would come or if the sun would poke through or not.. and that’s why you just had to be out there in order to be ‘lucky’ enough to get the visibility to enjoy the fresh snow.
Snow Quality and Stability
I’ve been talking about a weak layer that is still persistent on North’ish facing slopes above 2200 metres, and it is still there. Well traveled off piste runs in-resort are fairly well packed down by skier traffic now, but once you venture even a little way from where people have been skiing over the last couple months, it’s a much less stable situation. Plus you never know- so keep that weak layer (and what’s on top) in mind. You can keep up-to-date on this by visiting our blog on www.getoffpiste.com and looking for the avalanche forecast translation in the left column or if you can read French on: www.meteo-france.com >Montagne>Bulletins Avalanches.
I should point out that I have released a few small surface slabs of fresh snow on fairly steep convexities this past week. They were small (but big enough to knock you off your feet) because we didn’t have big accumulations when I set them off (which was on Wednesday). Remember that bigger accumulations will mean bigger slab potential! .. which brings us to the Tips for the week.
Tips for this coming week
This coming week looks like the same thing as last week in terms of weather: a series of snow storms coming through at some time or another (at least for the beginning of the week). So my advice is to just get out there and you’ll be lucky with the weather when it clears for a moment! And yes, I will reinforce my approach to skiing every fresh powder day: I start on low angle slopes and take into consideration everything that we present in our talks – again a summary is on my blog entry of 14 January on www.getoffpiste.com
Have Fun and Be Safe!
Tags: S5E12
