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Above: the route to Italy. We rode as far out as we could;
the route from there was to pick out way through the glaciated ice and
go up. There's a large rock at the right edge of the photo; the pass to
Italy is the brightly lit snow just to the left of it. |
The trip starts like the other Vallée Blanche routes:
you take the Aiguille du Midi up, trot down the Walk of Death, and then
ride out into the Vallée Blanche. However, once out in the valley,
instead of turning left towards the Mare du Glace, you continue straight
across the valley. |
Above: we ran out of momentum, and had to strap the snowshoes
on and begin hiking. From left: Leo, Oren, and Justine. |
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We were roped up with our climbing harnesses
as a precaution against crevasses. As you can see in the pictures though,
there was a clearly established track even though we were less than a
week out from the last storm.
This was the warmest day of our week in the Chamonix valley, so the climbing
warmed us right up! The slope varied a good deal, although we generallly
kept a steeper line than the skiers who preceded us, since we were on
snowshoes. Ralphie, our guide for the Italy trip, was on skis and kept
to the established skier trail most of the time. |
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Happy to not be climibing. |
After a little under an hour of steady climbing, we came out
in the pass. It was a very wide-open place for as narrow as it looked from
below. |
A view of the Italian Alps in the distance.
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Ralphie's skis embedded in the pass, looking down at Courmayuer,
Italy. |
As we rested momentarily in the pass, we saw the group just
ahead of us fussing with ropes and their climbing harnesses. We wondered
what was going on over there, and Ralphie said, "Oh, did I forget to
tell you there's a belay on the way into Italy?" Yes, Ralphie, you
forgot to tell us that. |
Ralphie watches the belay in action.
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Belaying, at least in this case with an established
belay line, was pretty simple although I hadn't actually done one before.
Hang onto the rope, slide out, and let the rope pay out as you work down
the slope. |
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| Oren is belayed down by Ralphie. The vertical
part of the belay extended down to the dark/light boundary in the snow below
Oren. |
Ralphie came last, and so he
had to self-belay. Needless to say, no problem for him. |
| Woo-hoo! Oren, safe and sound
in Italy. |
We thought the excitement would be over once
we were down the belay, but not quite. There was a set of steel stairs (seen
behind Oren at left) that led down the first couple hundred feet. The stairs
were fine, but where they let out was a very, very bad place to strap into
your board (seen at right). We each had a personal approach to trying to
get safely into our bindings. |
Justine's approach (click to enlarge) was to strap in on the steel safety
tread. Definitely a surer thing, although tough on the p-tex. I strapped
in out on the steep beyond the platform. |
| Once that was done with, we had beautiful spring-snow riding
down the hill, with amazing views of Courmayeur below. |
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Ralphie over Courmayeur. We're still not sure
how an Italian town got a French name like that, but maybe it's best not
to ask.
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Queen of the Glacier! |
The spring conditions on the way down the Italian
side.
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Eventually we arrived at the Helbronner midstation. The
key to this trip-to-Italy thing is that on the Italian side, a cable car
called the Helbronner runs back up the mountain and lets you out at another
entrance to the Vallée Blanche. Here's the view from the midstation
back up the mountain towards France.
We hung at the midstation for a quick lunch. Although it was just a sandwich
(it was about 1:45pm, meaning of course they had almost stopped serving;
Europe is very timely about food) it was a damn fine sandwich. This Italy
place seems very intriguing... |
Above: hanging with the international crowd (we heard a lot of languages).
At the right edge of the picture is a fellow visitor showing how Europeans
use their sunny lunch hours. We could learn something here. |
| On the way back up, we got to check out Italian engineering
up close and personal (4-person cable car). You know that joke about how
hell has the Italian mechanics and the British lovers? It didn't seem very
funny at the time. I'll take the French cable cars any day. |
Crevasse Man and Cliff Man. Plus a landslide warning and a no-
patrol- beyond- this- point. |
At left, we're at the top of the Helbronner about
to run back into the Vallée Blanche. They don't mess around with
the warning signs on that gate! |
Note the huge crevasse at the left of the photo. |
Now it was time to slide back down the Vallée
Blanche and across the Mare du Glace in beautiful spring conditions. We
started beside the spectacular rock formation there, and kept moving farther
and farther from it.
Unfortunately, at this point we wanted to keep speed up, since you don't
want to miss the last train back down from the Montenvers. The advantage
was that on our third Vallée Blanche trip of the week, we knew
the way. |
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| Mission accomplished! We made the last train down with time
to spare. The train was packed on the ride down, but even so we were three
very, very happy people. |
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| This was our last day of riding in Chamonix, but I'm certain
all of us will be back. While I'll never move my home hill outside the Sierra
Nevada, the terrain, conditions, and most of all mountaineering attitude
of the Chamonix Valley is fantastic. If you're a serious skier -- or if
you're the least inclined to try backcountry, off-piste activity -- the
Chamonix Valley is a tremendous destination. |
