With the foehn still persisting in Chamonix we had another enforced day off after our adventure to Trient. Winds & Clouds meant that most interesting options were off the radar, and we didn’t really feel like yo-yo-ing on the pistes with the hordes.

Word was filtering through that the Monte Rosa region of Italy had received a decent amount of fresh snow, so we made the split decision to head in that direction, and by lunchtime we were on skis in the town of Gressoney-La-Trinite. The region, particularly Alagna, has started to receive some coverage as a top shelf freeride destination over the last few years, so we were definitely keen to check it out.

The plan was to take the lifts over to Alagna, and spend the night in that town before our last day’s skiing. Unfortunately winds, visibility and avalanche risk had closed the link to Alagna, so we decided to head up the other side of the valley towards Champoluc for a look around.

Jerome’s first ride on a hooded chairlift:

Praying for snow Nepal style:

There was fresh snow in Champoluc, but unfortunately the fog was dense and the temperature had increased, so we stumbled our way around in the claggy snow. It looked like a very fun place to ski, with a different outlook to the other areas we had skied during our trip.

Dodgy Gondola:

How a guide finds his way around a new area:

Despite the poor visibility and heavy snow, we were starting to like the feel of the area. The skies were forecast to clear overnight, and we were looking forward to our last day on skis. After skiing we found a cool bar & restaurant in Gressoney-St-Jean called the Flying Brasserie and had a lovely dinner which led into far too many drinks afterwards. The bar was somewhat of a local hangout and we befriended the natives, with Jerome pumping them for information on where to ski the next day.

We wound up well on the wrong side of midnight, but as we stumbled our way to the hotel, we could see stars and a clear sky which we were hoping was a good sign for the morning.

As our last day dawned the dun did indeed shine, but regrettably the winds were howling:

All the upper lifts in the area were shut due to the wind, and the lower slopes would have been packed as the day was a de-facto public holiday due to the previous day being the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy, with many locals electing to take a long weekend.

We were pretty gutted, every decent ski area on the Italy-Swiss border was closed due to wind. Cervinia would have been a reasonable option but alas they were closed up top as well.

Jerome sought out a couple of the local guides who conveyed their pessimism that little of interest would open for the day. So it was with much regret that our last day had been a write off, we grabbed a coffee and jumped in the van back to Chamonix.

Safe location for a house in the Gressoney valley…..:

We even dropped by a tiny resort near the Col du Grand St Bernard called Crevacol with the hope of a ski tour from the top, but even their upper lift was closed due to the wind.

So after a lovely pasta lunch we returned to Chamonix where we packed up in preparation for a 6am departure to Geneva Airport the next day.

Despite our lack of fortune in the Monte Rosa area we left the place with a good vibe, it was definitely a place we were interested in returning to ski. After talking to some of the particularly passionate locals in the bar we were convinced that in the right conditions it could be a very worthy destination. As many people often say about travelling, you need to leave something for next time, so in addition to the famous Chamonix lines that we weren’t able to ski due to low snow, the Monte Rosa region is definitely a box left unticked. Jerome agrees, and is going to attempt to head there with friends to learn the area better as he sees the enormous potential as well.

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So while the first couple of weeks blessed us with clear skies, mild temperatures, low winds and a couple of snowfalls, our third week was proving a little tougher. A persistent foehn in the valley was making things quite unpleasant, and while it was being driven by snowfall on the Italian slope, high cloud meant that visibility was compromised. And as we were now heading into Spring of what had so far been a pretty ordinary season, there wasn’t the snowpack down low to ski below the clouds.

Jerome had done an absolutely superb job in moving us around to make the most of the conditions and the weather, but it was becoming a difficult task. The disappointing aspect of this was that after 2 weeks we were now ski fit, with strong legs and lungs, all the earlier niggles were now dialled in, and we were a lot more mobile having progressed with our touring techniques.

Grey skies in spring, especially after a warm period, are a recipe for persistent firm snow, which stymied our requests to get into the steeps that the Chamonix area was famous for. Lines that we had earlier skied under blue skies and in corn snow like the Couloirs Rama and Marbrées would now be death traps.

As well as not being good for serious descents, we were about to learn about ascending in the hard snow. Jerome had wanted us to take the popular Col du Passon ski tour, as well as being one of the classics in Chamonix, it is also increasingly being used in preference to the Col du Chardonnet as the first leg of the Haute Route. But with the top cable car of Les Grands Montets being closed due to wind we needed to make an alternate arrangement, so we decided to ski tour from Le Tour to Trient with an ascent of Les Grandes Autannes, a 2700m peak on the French/Swiss border. In a regular season and softer snow it would have been a pretty pedestrian 500m ascent, however firm snow and exposed grass made things a little different.

We rode up a gondola and chair at Le Tour, fixed our skins & ski crampons and started climbing:

After a couple of precarious kick turns on the steep ice it was time to rope up and switch to crampons. My baggy Rip Curl pants are not particularly suited to this kind of activity and the legs are now sporting some crampon holes from a couple of missed steps!

It was pretty slow progress alternating between the crusty snow and frozen grassy patches as we learned new techniques – while the rope was obviously very useful for safety it was also quite restrictive, doing it on ones own with a piolet in hand would be a much more comfortable proposition.

Straddling the border:

Once we reached the top we were in the full force of the foehn, but noticed that it was also blowing some nice soft snow into the valley. So we dropped into the Swiss side of the ridgeline, alternating between fresh and windpacked snow:

Great views of the Glacier des Grandes and Glacier du Trient as we descended:

Alta skiers get around:

We then reached the valley and skied alongside the farms to the small town of Trient:

Jerome had planned to catch an earlier bus from Trient and come back around to ski another couloir, but we were a lot slower than anticipated on the ascent due to the trying conditions for rookie climbers, so we had an hour to kill and found ourselves a nice lunch:

This was followed by a bus around to Vallorcine, where we took a couple of lifts to ski back to the car at Le Tour. While we had spent much of our trip up high and on glaciers, the lower reaches were looking like Australia in a bad season: