A perfect cloudless winter day for Michelle to practice her mountaineering skills and for me to practice some short roping on her! No matter how many times you do this route its still loads of fun in a beautiful setting. Thanks Michelle!
While we anxiously waited for snow to arrive I took the opportunity to snatch a day alpine climbing with my good friend Andy Houseman. Its great to cross train to avoid imbalances and injury and besides I still love Alpine climbing despite not having too much time away from skiing to do it. My friend Nico Magnin had been to Fil a Plomb so we took advantage of his trail breaking to have a fun day climbing this Chamonix classic. I was also testing those Lenz heat socks in my lighter Scarpa Phantom boots. Usually I suffer from really cold feet but the socks worked brilliantly and enabled me to leave my heavier Scarpa 6000s at home. Check them out at https://www.lenzproducts.com/. I chose the 1800 rcb battery for long days alpine climbing.
The Navis has been in the Black Crows line up since the early days and became a cult ski amongst the Chamonix steep skiers. In 2015 Black Crows introduced the lightened Freebird range for the back country.
Initially I was suspicious that the ride quality and dampening was going to be compromised by the lightened poplar / carbon / glass fibre core and I was slow to get out on them – how wrong could I be! I mounted mine with PLUM guides for the 2015 winter and was really surprised by how dampened the ski is. It skis similarly to the classic 2012 Volkl Mantra but without the weight of the metal sheets. My skis are the 179.4 / 133-102-118 / 19.
After the European winter I took my Navis Freebird to ski mountaineer in New Zealand where big walks carrying kit are the order of the day. They make the perfect compromise of weight, float with 102 under foot and edge holding.
Since then I have remounted them with a PLUM 170 race binding and the set up weighs 4120 g. The 2016 version has been lightened by 400 g so with any type of low tech binding it would give you a 4 kg set up. These are still my go to ski and the 102 under foot makes them much better for edging on firm or spring snow.
This is one of my favourite touring loops in the Argentiere basin which is continually interesting as it provides the variety of skinning, bootpacking, scrambling, rope work and some couloir skiing. I’m not going to give away any details excpet to ay I regularly see Killian on it before he goes on to tag a few other peaks. Usually its pretty quick but before they opened the top GM tram it felt considerably longer with the bonus skin from Bochard over the Col des Rachasses and it ended up being a 6 hour day – its nice to get some mileage for those big 12-15 hr days that lie ahead and just for general base fitness to be able to ski every day. Besides, being alone in the Argentiere basin and hanging out below those beautiful big walls is well worth that effort.
The autumn and pre Christmas period was a busy one for me with our trip to New Zealand, high pressure in the Alps and perfect stable snow conditions for exploring. That meant I only had a couple of rest days per month and by the end of the year I touched 180 ski days – hence the reason why my blog was somewhat neglected due to the ease of posting to instagram and facebook!
The day after the PLUM party Vivian Bruchez, Giulia Monego and Dave Searler headed to Pointe d”Orny to ski one of the couloirs. After climbing the couloir we sat and ate lunch in while soaking up the sun on the plateau and taking in the views of the Chardonnet and surrounding peaks. Once again we found a mixture of good cold snow varying from powder to chalk.
Ross Hewitt Guiding 