Immerse yourself in the photo above. You are looking down into the Vallon du Saut, deep in the Vanoise National Park, from the Col du Mont Vallon. The air is fresh and chilled; the snow light and powdery. There isn’t a sound to be heard, which is eerie because two snow shoers are looking up, next to the partly-buried shepherds hut in the bottom right corner. This is where John, Gilly and I found ourselves on the last day of their weeks holiday recently. We paused, looked around, and then floated off down through the fluffy powder.
As mentioned on my previous post, it’s very special being able to work and share these experiences in this environment. It was John and Gilly’s first real backcountry expedition, what I mean by that is skiing miles away out of sight of pistes and lifts.
I’ve a sneaky feeling that they have been hooked by the solitude and the wilderness that I myself fell in love with, many years ago. It’s very difficult to describe this feeling to normal piste skiers, let alone non- skiers. But you see, you don’t just suddenly throw yourself into these situations; it would be way too dangerous. We had been building up to this moment for all of the week.
Each day we had been working on the psychological and technical skills required for venturing further afield. Although I had taken John into this terrain a couple of times, down some couloirs, I wanted to introduce Gilly to these same very steep and narrow off-piste challenges. In the end all three of us together skied loads of couloirs, which will remain nameless, where we developed the psychological and technical skills at the same time as enjoying the buzz. I won’t even begin to name the couloirs because it will make us sound like we were showing off and bragging about it. Plus I didn’t take any photos either because to be honest it was all gnarly enough without me getting Canon out of my backpack.
A very important aspect of skiing off-piste is starting to be more responsible for your own and each others safety. This includes being more aware of the avalanche risk, looking for clues of any other dangers, and carrying off-piste safety kit and knowing how to use it.
The photo above shows Gilly using her ‘beeps’ and searching for a buried victim, don’t worry not a real person. A beep (also known as an avalanche beacon, or an Arva, or pieps) is a device that is attached to your body and transmits a signal. In the event of someone getting caught and buried in an avalanche slide, other members of the skiing party switch their beeps from transmit to receive. This should allow the searching party to locate the transmitting beeps, ie the buried victim. Once located, the casualty will need to be dug out by using a shovel, another important part of the avalanche safety kit that should always be carried. But of course, this all needs to be done as quickly as possible to give the buried victim as much chance of survival. This means practice, and practice, and practice.
One morning we skied to the top of a very attractive-looking couloir over in Courchevel, loaded with fresh powder snow. John and Gilly were licking their lips in anticipation. But instead of us all bouncing down, I decided to turn John’s descent into a beeps searching exercise. Gilly and I skied into the couloir and enjoyed the fresh powder, then we buried a spare beeps in a bag out of sight from John.
John did really well with his first real life scenario, and found the buried beeps. Without disclosing his timings, he was surprised to hear how long it took to locate and dig out the ‘victim’. Every second counts in this situation. With John and Gilly now being well equipped, and practised in using this equipment, it completely enabled us to venture further afield out into the backcountry. So with another small dusting of snow just before the end of their week, I felt more than happy to take them deep into the off-piste conditions, knowing that we were all well-equipped, and practised as well. And what an experience it was.
Skiing down into the Vallon du Saut is one of their favourite walks here in the summer months. I suspect that the next time they go for a walk high up in the Vanoise National Park, they will enjoy it even more knowing that they had skied there in lovely powder this winter. ‘Chapeau’ as the French say.
Martin
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