I just spent the week in La Grave, with a detour on the way to ski a day at Les Deux Alpes, doing the Professional Course of the European Avalanche School (EAS). In fact this is the only course run by EAS and it takes place each year, primarily it’s part of the induction course for aspirant IFMGA guides registered in the British scheme but as a professional course provides development for other professionals operating on avalanche terrain.
It’s run by Steve Jones a British Guide based in Leysin who’s also a director of the International School of Mountaineering there, Per Ås, a Swedish Guide based in La Grave and Mark Diggins who’s the coordinator of the SportScotland Avalanche Information Service.

The mess of gear on the right is only actually from six of us doing some digging in the snow to look at structures and layers. It always makes me smile how very few gear and clothing brands are represented on these sort of events, the same few names, Rab, ME, Mammut, Marmot etc being about 80% of the gear. Another fairly weak showing for TK Maxx though

Some French rescue teams were also running some exercises around La Grave with helicopter pilots revalidating their mountain competencies. That was quite handy at the time as we were doing some transceiver searches and probing exercises so having helicopters in the air and touching down adds some realism to the environment.

La Grave itself is quite a nice place to be, the Skiers Lodge is great and the food is particularly worthy of praise. So, all in all, a good week and another certificate for the wall/logbook.

Tags: EAS | European Avalanche School | La Grave

There’s not been a huge amount of fresh snow in Zinal for little while so it’s all pretty tracked but there’s still some good skiing as always. I’d met up with David and we skied in the freeride area a little before heading to Grimentz via a nice couloir pitch. Over in Grimentz the steeper north facing couloirs were also skiing pretty well so we tried some of them before skiing down into St-Jean taking the bus back to Zinal via Grimentz.

Tags: Grimentz | ski Grimentz | Ski Zinal | Zinal

After not posting any photo’s for ages, here’s two days one after another! Obviously slightly busier today with the main holiday season kicking in so there was a small queue for the lift, in fact the new, increased capacity car looks like it’s copying reasonably well all things considered. But, I’d decided to skin up anyway, I’ve not skinned up to the top for ages so today was a good day for some exercise.
The trouble was, after doing a lot of nordic skiing recently, my skis felt like they weighed a ton, on any moderate gradient nordic skis are just so much better so it felt a bit like hard work until I got warmed up and into a groove.
But, a nice day which is what I took a couple more photo’s.

Tags: Ski Zinal | Skiing | Zinal