Tag: helbronner
Petit Mont Blanc – Bonatti Couloir
Davide de Masi and Max Turgeon waiting for the gondola to open.
Hard snow. I skied lots of this stuff as a kid in Scotland and its as pleasurable for me as skiing over peoples tracks. I’ll come back to GS this in pow. 
Max Turgeon skiing at my turn around point. He went up the the first narrows.
Time for a rest day after 4 days on in the big mountains.
Dent du Geant South Face
I’ve been waiting for the right conditions to get this done for a few years now. This years exceptional snowfalls on the Italian frontiere ridge of the Mont Blanc massif has ensured the rocks at the top are covered, and on the back of a Foehn storm we were guaranteed cold snow. After queuing with the holiday makers until 10 am for the lift it was going to be a race to the top quick to ski before it got too hot. There was no time to wait for the lift guys to put our skis on the cable trolley and we comically wrestled our skis out of their hands explaining we had lost too much time to wait. Running up the stairs with our skis on our backs to the top station (its nearly 3500m) was a rude lactic inducing warm up.
The climb up to the Dent du Geant follows the normal summer line; characterised by loose rubble and slabs under a dusting of faceted snow which all feels a bit precarious. The reward today was 2500 m of lush rip-able snow and 25 minutes later we were down at the road.
Looking back up, the first hot afternoon of spring produced some pretty impressive slides as the face purged its winter coat, trashing it until next year.
Tour Ronde Brenva
This week I have had the fortune and pleasure of two runs down in the Brenva cirque in great powder throughout the 2000 m + descent. The first run entered the Brenva Glacier down Couloir Cache, the second time we took the South West Couloir from the summit of Tour Ronde. This time I enjoyed the company of Michelle and Andy Benson.
The Brenva Face of Mont Blanc in the background.
The amazing backdrop of the icy North Face of the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey, first skied by Anselme Baud and Patrick Vallencent, and its impressive rocky East Face which has only been skied by Italian Maestro Stephano de Benedetti in the early 80’s. De Benedetti poetically describes his motivation and rewards for taking on the immense psychological challenges of Big Mountain Skiing in the clip below from the movie ‘Steep’. Check it out:
More Couloir Cache Photos
Sylvain sent me through his photos from yesterday’s run:
With a lot of fresh cooking in this suntrap I tied on to make the traverse to the couloir.
Ross Hewitt Guiding 