Alpine Break

I saw a nice looking couloir on the pic du Jaillon last weekend when I was up at Arvieux skiing with Ollie. I had a look in the book and couldn’t find it so I managed to get Hubert interested in going and checking it out.

The couloir I saw is the unmarked one. Working out how to get through the lower rock band was bit tricky and we ended up going up further right than planned, but there happened to be a nice looking couloir right above us so we decided to have a crack at that one instead.

It turned out that the last 10 meters were not skiable as the wind had ripped all the snow off the rocks, apart from that though the snow was great. It was solid chalky snow in the whole couloir.

The top section of the couloir was between 45° and 50°. Then it flattened out a bit on the apron between the two rocky sections before getting steeper again in the next section of couloirs.

Here is a map of the route

download it to view in Google Earth

Filed under: Photo on February 22nd, 2009