Chamonix Trip Report - Day 3 - Brevent and Flegere

We awoke with a start early the next morning and looked out the window to just see the sun hitting the top of Mont Blanc. It was a perfect bluebird day. I had been feeling pretty far from home but its amazing how even on the other side of the Atlantic, once I had my trusty boots buckled up tight, polypropolyen against my skin, my skis on my feet I felt right at home among the rocks, trees and trams of Chamonix. We started by walking from the hotel up to the Telecabine Chamonix-Planpraz in our new Technical Extreme gear and our rented 85mm underfoot Moment skis. No line
whatsoever and we had a bin to ourselves. The view of the mountain world from the PlanPraz was mind blowing. Clouds swirled below and bad ass black crows swooped and hovered over the exposure with the Mont Blanc massif as a backdrop. Cold snow crystals floated in the blue sky glinting in the sun. The Telepherique Planpraz- Brevent started from a location candalevered out over the cliffs and went up to an impossible summit in one fell swoop...No towers, no nothing, just rock, snow and air. As we went up I spotted my line. It was a series of untracked faces, skiers right, in between a cat track that weaved its way down Piste Charles Bozon. It was difficult to figure out what was open, what was closed, what was off-piste. Some places are actually posted as closed, but you can still go. Some places have no ropes or signs but are still very dangerous. We had no beacons. I was ducking ropes to get to my line. The snow was like no other I had ever seen before... I was a meter of dust on crust. and by dust I mean it was the lightest snow I had every seen. Lighter than 40 years of skiing in CO and UT, and by crust I mean that it was pretty icy. When you skied the thigh deep snow you could not even feel it on your legs and your skies jumped around underneath like you where skiing on some set up death cookies.

It wasn't epic good, but it was epic weird. I expected my line to sluff, and sluff it did, but I made the decision to ski with the moving snow as it was so light and my pitches were short enough. The WildSnow swirled up over and around me as I dropped into my first off-piste line in Chamonix. Wont forget it. We zigzagged our way across the ski area in awe of the possibilities and the differences from what what were used to. At the Index chair at Flegere it got windy and there was a lot of snow to transport. We saw some foot deep slabs cut loose spontaneously from the chair. We skied one off-piste line here carefully picking safe terrain. On the next lap the chair was closed to avalanches.

What a satisfying day. We didn't care about our luggage anymore. We knew we were good to go. Jill and I reveled in sharing this adventure, the comraderee, friendship and love in an apres ski bliss as we recounted each run over beer, cheese and meat.

Chamonix Trip Report - Day 2 - Joyeux Noel

It was pretty Christmasy in our little room the next morning. I brought coffee in bed for Jill, there was tons of snow coming down outside and we had our gifts that we had packed in our carry-ons. There was the advent calendar from Nammy and the tiny little wrapped box mom had sent us off with for our stocking which was a miniature Christmas music box with a miniature snow covered town and moving train. This is the music box that looks just like Chamonix and that you can put in your pocket and have Christmas anywhere.It was GreyBird in Chamonix Christmas morning and its good thing, because being there in any other kind of weather without skis would have would have promptly caused me to turn into either a little pile of slush or a huge car sized boulder tumbling down a 45 degree slope. So it was pretty easy to take this day to: 1)wait to see if our ski gear arrived 2)get over our jetlag 3)eat a huge french style Christmas meal 4) scope out the ski rental scene.
It was a tough call because our luggage included not only all our ski cloths and skis, but also all our other gear such as rope, harnesses, hardware, beacon probe, shovel and cameras. You can't rent ski cloths so we were faced with the decision of purchasing entire outfits with the posibility of our luggage showing up that very moment. Three things made the decision for us: First was our discovery of the store
"Technical Extreme" This place had super dirt cheap ski cloths. Second factor was a bar conversation. We were is a little back alley of Chamonix in a tiny little bar drinking beer. As the night went on we began a conversation with he bar tender, a super young kid from Bazil and was fluent in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. We began talking about the mountains. When I asked him if he skied or snowboarded he exclaimed: "I am a Freerider!" He was super animated and excited about skiing. He was a pro and explained to us that it had been snowing for three days and that there was 1 meter 10 cm of fresh and that the sky was clearing and that at 6:30am he would be on an early bin and start hiking at Brevant with his telle and alpine bros for a deep bluebird photo shoot. Third and deciding factor was an email from my father that went something like this:

"Did I ever tell you about the night Alastair and Brad and I spent in the Gondola at the top? We had just come down from, and I'll not have the spelling correct, El Dromidair and the Aquie DuMidi. It was too late to catch a ride down, we'd spent the previous sleepless night in a hut, playing cards by candle lite with a deck that had the Jack of Spades missing. Remind me to tell you what happened, if I've not
already."

or there was this note:

"I told you once, I believe, of my first journey to Chamonix. It was around 15 Dec, 1963. I had leave from my army base in Hiedelberg and was headed there to meet Brad Reed, who got leave from his Radio-Free-Europe US Coast Guard cutter in the Mediterranean. I took a wrong turn at some rail station just before i was to arrive in Chamonix and ended up around midnight with my cog-train clacking up a steep ridge and finally pulling into a very small village for the night. It was the first huge snow storm with the wet flakes were stacking deeply and there were 4 of us with no place to stay. I had my extended Kelty aluminum frame expedition pack with crampons and ropes and my first REI external frame tent. Between the four us there was, as I remember, not a shared language. We all trudged up from the station, very cold and tired and finally pounded on the door of what seemed like the the hotel where Hansel and Grettel would stay. After a while a fine old "Kurtish" kind of man came and welcomed us all happily into his great room where the big fire was still going. The Hotel was closed, but he brought us big glasses of hot wine, a loaf of very dark bread and a pan of melted butter and then said goodnight and left us to "camp" on his great-room floor in front of his fire with the big logs. He let none of us pay and by noon the next day I was in Chamonix and had met up with Brad and Alastair at the La National, the climbing guides bar and hang-out, just along the glacial river and off the central square.

Anyway, more than you wanted to read when you could be skiing. It only seems like yesterday now with you there. So go ski, even if you have to rent or borrow skis!"

So now maybe you see why I love my father's stories and why it is so great when he writes them all down or tells them in detail. and maybe now you see why these notes were the deciding factor in helping us make our decision about what our next course of action would be.

Chamonix Trip Report - Day 1 - The Journey

We knew we were flying into the heart of the storm...but we went anyway. The news had been littered with images of passengers sleeping on the floor with lumpy piles of luggage and headlines like: “European Deep Freeze Causes Travel Chaos!” …and we were traveling on Christmas Eve, so it was the perfect storm for travel trouble. I figured we had about a 30% chance of making our scheduled flights and about a 70% chance of spending Christmas in the airport, so we picked our carry-on items carefully. These included our ski boots...the most coveted item for any skier. We also brought the advent calendar Nammy had given us and from my mother, a piece of marzipan and a very small wrapped package that we were to save for our stave for our stockings. I also packed one gift for my sweetie. I was picturing us huddled on the floor of CDG around a small Christmas tree constructed of found objects singing Christmas carols with a few lost families from around the world.
Even on the morning we left, the Delta website was warning of delays due to winter weather in Atlanta, our first stopping leg. Atlanta, That's way south!. We drank campaign on the flight to CDG in celebration of our journey and our excitement. I was under the impression that we would somehow slip though based on some of Jonah’s travel luck having rubbed off on me. Alas, just when we thought we might somehow slip through, we saw the dreaded words “cancelled” in red on the monitor next to our destination, Geneva Switzerland. We were trapped in an odd no man's land of the airport. We had no valid boarding pass to get to the gates but we didn't want to leave the secured area because we knew that in some cases they were not allowing people backing the airport due to the overcrowding situation. People were disparate in line. Some bailed to take the train, but I had read that there were thousands sleeping at the train station. We discussed taking the train with the Spanish couple but we would not be able to get our luggage if we bailed on the plane. The small area where we waited did not have restrooms. We waited for four hours. And at about noon they did rebook us on flight to Geneva at 8:30 that evening. Our gate was semi superdome...People sleeping on the floor everywhere people waiting in long lines. The snow fell outside.

We got a SIM card for our borrowed phone but couldn't get it to work. We needed to call the hotel and shuttle to let them know we were late so that we would have ride and a room when we got there. We tried using the pay phone. This totally reminded me of when Jonah and I had arrived at CDG 20 years earlier with no place to stay and had trying to figure out the coins and buttons on the phone in vain, before taking a taxi into town to see what we could find. This time Jill figured it out and we were able to make both calls. So we had seats on the 8:30pm flight to Geneva but there was a 3:30 flight with 55 people on the waiting list. The flight boarded and there was a crowd around the gate, I thought probably for the waiting list, but no names or other info came up on the screens. There was lots of heated discussions in all languages other than English at the front of the line or crowd. One potential passenger after another left dejected and it now looked like the flight door must be closed as everyone had left. A had been standing at the back of the crowd which had now dispersed and now found myself right up at the counter and wasn’t sure why I was even there except out of boredom. The attendant looked up at me and I said: "Is their room for my wife and I?" He looked at me and to my great surprise, he said: “absolutely!!" He printed us out two boarding passes, wished us a merry Christmas and we got on the plane. We were the last two. Of course this is probably where we lost our bags.

But I had made a conscious decision to get us there even if it cost us our bags. The true implications would only sink in the next morning when I discovered what it feels like to be in the center of the ski universe without your skis. We took the shuttle into Chamonix and couldn't believe how snowy and cool looking the town was, driving around these little streets in the snowstorm.
When we finally pulled up to the Hotel Faucigny I couldn’t believe we where there. And it looked like it was out of a fairy tail. It was old, covered in snow and ice, and had small Christmas lights. On the locked front door was a small note to Jill and I welcoming us, wishing us merry Christmas and instructions for getting into our room. It was a Christmas Eve we will never forget.

The Journey from Aaron Stanford on Vimeo.

Bermuda Triangle

We found a pretty cool new place to shoot today in the "three" inches of snow that fell. A few notes for next time...bring more batteries for the flashes and power them way up. Keep the triggers in chest pockets, straps and clear bags in the other. Get the flashes higher and in front of the skier. Don't pan with subject. If using small aperture such as f16, you may have to bump iso up to keep a decent shutter speed.

Impeccable Ski Etiquette

On my way to 13 turns (or unreliable) I was careful not to knock any snowboarders off the edge. I didn't pee in the boot pack. I waited my turn as others put their skis on. I didn't hike above the existing traverse. I didn't traverse across the slope and I stuck to my fall line the whole way down...and i got extra etiquette bonus points for spraying a snowboarder at the end.

13 Turns from Aaron Stanford on Vimeo.
These next two photos where taken by powdershots at the same time I was taking the GoPro footage. They're pretty underexposed as it was super brilliant white out there. Kind of an armature mistake, as many think they should drop down their exposure a little in order to compensate for bright situations. Or maybe he was using a Canon rather than a Nikon.
You can buy great photos from there website here:
http://www.powdershots.com/

On Ice and Snow and Rock

Since the age of about 9 or 10, maybe earlier, I have been fairly obsessed with the mountains, with skiing and with climbing and mountaineering and with adventure of any sort. We had a book when I was growing up called "On Ice and Snow and Rock" by Gaston Rebuffat. I'm pretty sure my father brought it back with him from Chamonix. It had many full color pictures of Gaston climbing the beautiful granite spires that rip up through the brilliant glaciers around Mont Blanc. For anyone who has seen this book you know how great these pictures are. The images stick with me more than those of my other children's books. At night my father would pour a cup of Cognac, light the lantern and read aloud from Annapurna in which Gaston performed such human acts of heroism while so out of his home alpine element. His knickers and wool sweater seemed so impossible and out of place in this high Himalayan darkness which I already understood was another world. Jill and I are leaving for Chamonix in 9 days.

The book wasn't the only thing my father brought back from chamonix. He brought back a bunch of great stories, a bunch of great color slides, some cool glacier glasses with beads sewn on the side by the hand of some hot french chick. He brought back two ice axes....(if anyone knows where they might be, please bring them back to the ridge) and I'm pretty sure that he came back with a bunch of memories that I wish he would write down or tell to me as a story.

I'm so excited for this trip that I can hardly think. I have been obsessed with the planning of this trip and with ensuring that I can keep my wife and I safe here, in what some perceive as a Disyland of mountains, that in spite of all the hype, can unknowingly give anyone the ultimate beat-down like horse shakes a thousand flies off its back and continues eating. I will be out of my element and I know enough to give these mountains the respect they deserve. Just because there are three espresso machines within a 1 mile radius doesn't mean that the stone falling at 150 mph will hurt less. For some reason it is with quite a bit of emotion that I travel to Chamonix.

Mmm... but the espresso will be good. For anyone planning a trip to Chamonix for skiing here are a few weather links that you may find helpful:

Good basic weather for quickly viewing on a phone
http://chamonix-meteo.com/bul/metPreMatEn.php

SnowForcast – with extended
http://www.snow-forecast.com/resorts/Chamonix/6day/top

Welove2ski
http://www.welove2ski.com/jsp/index.jsp?lnk=000

Seblog video report
http://www.welove2ski.com/snow-report/Chamonix/

Chamonix.net – webcams, snow report
http://www.chamonet.com/

Compagniedumontblanc
http://www.compagniedumontblanc.fr/index.php

Intellicast
http://www.intellicast.com/Local/Weather.aspx?unit=F&location=FRXX0212

MetoFrance With avalanche…needs to be translated using Google…
http://france.meteofrance.com/france/MONTAGNE?MONTAGNE_PORTLET.path=montagnebulletinneige/DEPT74

First Run on New Planks

I was pretty psyched to find an untracked line this long inside the ski area for my first test of the new boards. This is my favorite kind of snow...technically this type of snow is called baby butt.

First Run on New Planks from Aaron Stanford on Vimeo.

More Testing of Skis and Camera from Aaron Stanford on Vimeo.