Wednesday December 11, 2024
We set off skiing today with a certain weight lifted off our shoulders. Yesterday we had done our assessment day, meaning we could relax and take part in the coming days’ instruction and classroom sessions without the bearing weight of having to regurgitate it all to an assessor.
That being said, we still had to be on the ball about things. This was another day of all mountain leadership, this time spending a great deal of time exploring when and where the snow would be best on all sides of the mountain.
This is a really tricky skill to pick up, and one I confess I am still working to acquire. Snow kept in shade in the morning might be quite firm and icey, only softening up as the sun hits it later in the day. However, if you are skiing higher up the mountain, the same freeze-thaw pattern won’t have had the same effect and you may find that powder is preserved more perfectly in these more precipitous places.
You also need to account for things like the wind, too. Wind can pick up snow and move it from one place to another, leaving scoured, hardpack surfaces where it once was and depositing delightful pockets of powder on more leeward slopes. As a trick, you can always see snow that has been moved by wind as it takes on a matt grey colour and effect.
We set off straight to the top of the Grand Motte and cut off down a run called Genepe. This is one of my favourite runs in the whole of Tignes, a mellow off-piste track that normally has a piste tracked through the middle of it, but at this early stage of the season there generally isn’t enough snow to do so. That means you get a nice, long run of fairly untouched powder to enjoy – just take care to carry some speed as it is a fairly long, flat run out at the bottom.
From Genepe, we skied down into La Daille and after a short bus ride up through town we ended up on the Solaise side of Val d’Isere. La Daille is a great piste to ski to demonstrate the changing nature of snow, especially if you start from higher up the Tignes sector.
The run winds and weaves its way down to 1,800m, through trees, too, meaning it is susceptible to a variety of conditions along the way. When we were there it was often icy, the high-density manufactured snow lining the piste fresh off the snow cannons mixing things up in an often unpleasant way.
Up on Solaise, however, it was a different story. The higher elevations up here meant the snow was in a much better conditions, and we made our way up to the Madeleine chair before heading down to Manchet.
Manchet is the normal run out for a wide range of off-piste routes, often some of the best in the valley. The Tor de Charvet comes off the top of the Grand Pré chair and is often one of the best runs first thing in the morning, especially as it is prone to avalanche later in the afternoon. Cugnaï drains out here, too, a run in which I have a real love-hate relationship but ultimately is phenomenal, and the very bottom of this is shared with the run down from Col des Fours, which I have toured over the last couple of years.
Diving off the piste by the Madeleine chair, where there are normally a pair of pistes instead there was untouched powder – it was still too early in the season for the piste bashers to do their work. We dropped down a roller at a time, exploring soft powder, then more sticky, lower altitude snow as we kept going, with a couple of pockets of wind crust along the way. This was probably the best example of how snow changes over elevation that we had experienced all day.
This was easily the most relaxed day we’d had on snow so far – with the weight of our Rep assessment behind us we were able to let off a little bit of steam and just enjoy the skiing.
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