Firstly, I apologise to any paddlers with no interest in skiing as it’s forming a bit part of my life at the moment! I’m in Chamonix for approx 10 days of ski touring with 2 friends from Wales. We nearly broke ourselves on the first day with an epic 11 hour day… it wouldn’t have been so long if we hadn’t missed the last train back down to Chamonix and had a 2 hour walk/ ski/ walk down the railway track in our boots, carrying our skis! The ski touring before that was pretty adventurous as we skied up almost 1,000 metres us a steep gully to a col. On the other side was an even steeper gully which we abseiled down 2 rope lengths of 50 metres. In theory we could now ski down a great 45 degree slope full of lovely snow. In practice the snow was icy and hard and trying to turn down it would have been crazy. We side slipped down for what felt like ages, making only 2 turns when the snow was a bit softer. At the bottom of the never-ending gully was the bergschrund, a big crevasse which extended all the way across the glacier without a snow bridge. My nerves were frayed enough alread and I had to jump over that, with enough speed not to fall into the hole, but not so much speed that I couldn’t stop and I ended up skiing into the bergschrund further along! We had a few good turns after that, then a long almost flat ski out to the train station. Despite walking up 200metres worth of steps as quickly as we could, we missed the last train… hence our sore bodies and tired muscles the next morning. Today we had a nice day touring some cols at between 3300m and 3500m to help us acclimatise. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be less stiff!?

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