Alpine Break

I had a look down this couloir back in January thinking it looked like a good ski, tricky entrance and a small rock step in the middle. With my brother being out for a few days we decided to go and give it a go. When we got there there were some tracks in it, a couple of people had rapped in from the skiers left, and someone had rapped in around the right hand side and traversed back into the couloir.

We went for the line that I had scoped previously which got us in without using a rope by dropping onto the obvious pillows.

The top section then had some big wide sections with lots of great snow.

Then it got a bit narrower before reaching this small rock step that could be taken on the skiers left without much difficulty.

Then the couloir carried on down with no exposure and great snow to the valley floor.

We then went back up and headed over to the other end of the La Cube ridge where we found this couloir

Which started out on fantastic snow. From below it looked like the small rock step could be avoided by a traverse to the skiers right, but when we got there we saw a knotted rope hanging off a tree which was just the right length to hand over hand down the step.

We found out later that it was Gilles who had left this rope in place too. All in all a good days skiing and exploration in the Ceillac ski area.

Here is a map of the route

download it to view in Google Earth

Filed under: Photo on February 1st, 2009