Alpine Climbing & Skiing: Frost Guiding Blog

 Off-piste in Zinal and Grimentz for most of last week. This is a great area and still has some untracked snow - incredible as it hasn't snowed for a month. To be fair there is a fair amount of crust as well....

A big thankyou to Eric and Penny at the superb SkiZinal Chalet Edelweis - fantastic food and a very good sleep - and all at the foot of the best off-piste descent in Zinal!

Credit due also to the ski area workers who have managed to keep the pistes in excellent condition. 

Sadly, I've discovered that my new camera isn't waterproof, so no pictures...

The winter season is nearly fully booked now but we still have a few dates available for climbing or skiing:

- 6-11 February: ice climbing, off-piste or ski touring

- 6-9 March: off-piste, ski touring or mountaineering

- 18-23rd April: off-piste, ski touring or mountaineering

- May...

Contact by e-mail or phone for details...

 ...the famous Cogne ice climb. Excellent conditions there yesterday. We made the long trek south to try to beat the warm weather that's stripped so much of the ice around here. The base of Repentance is at 2100m and in the shade. Plenty of brittle icicles, some very wet bits and no recent ascents meant some hard work, but the ice was very good. A painful 4am start from Evolene was worth it - we were first there, just in  front of a french team. 

 It's been long time since it snowed but there's still some powder to ski...today on the Pallanche the sunny side was terrible - well skied and re-frozen crust. We walked 100m down the north ridge from the summit and skied down the valley to L'A Vieille, finding 600 vertical metres of untouched powder - perfect. All that remained was 1000m of perfect crust to the road....hmmm. 

Great ice climbing on the Coop icefall in Evolene today. After a few cold nights the ice was very hard but the route is in good condition.