Thursday, April 25, 2013

Worst Avalanche Forecast I have seen


So it went from 24c to 30cm of snow in the garden over night and the most widespread high avalanche forecast I had ever seen. All this coincided with the arrival of Agust Gudmundsson and his great pal Astvalur [Valti] Gudmundsson for 5 days ski touring. Clearly we needed a plan B and we needed it fast.
So we jumped in the car and 3 hours later we were climbing above the Mediterranean at Capo Noli
We found a hotel and climbed some bigger routes the next day. This was Valti's first real multipitch climbing and he was impressed.
The next day was very un Mediterranean - it rained so over a cappuccino in the port at Genoa we hit on the next idea : The weather forecast and avalanche forecast were now good for the next few days and so we took a helicopter form Sion to the top of the Wildhorn as a way of catapulting ourselves along our originally planned ski tour.
We arrived on the summit at 8.30am and enjoyed very good spring snow skiing , followed by a hot climb up to the Wildstrubel Hut where we were the only guests.
It was an early 6.00am start for our ascent of the Rohrbachstein 2950m
From its summit we skied and skinned back towards the lift system of Crans Montana , [where they obligingly opened the drag lift inorder to get us back into the lift system] before some more spring snow where we arrived at 10.00am for an a "late morning beer.

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