May 30, 2013

Steep skiing Pic sans nom

Mountaineering… in the Calanques!Week-end mountaineering Introductory

Powder draws Sylvain and me to Pic Sans Nom. We nearly turn back in the couloir, then ski down to Glacier Noir with burning thighs and shouts of joy.

A skier in a red jacket turns in powder below the rock walls of Pic Sans Nom.

The call of powder put an end to our plans to go rock climbing. Sylvain and I get ourselves moving and head for Pic Sans Nom in the Écrins. This time we’d quite like to be out on our skis while it’s happening, instead of reading about everyone else’s five-star days on Skitour…

It was busy in the area last week, with eight people in the Coup de Sabre on the same day. Now that the steep-skiing crowd has had its fill, we reckon we might get a bit of peace up there. Bingo! We’re almost on our own. Just two skiers heading for Coolidge and one on his own going to Col de la Temple.

From below, the Coup de Sabre looks a bit rougher than the more even Pic Sans Nom couloir. Let’s go for that one, then. Or why not both?

Thirty centimetres of fresh snow make for some hard trail-breaking, and after weeks of doing very little our soft bodies are already feeling it. We pass the little icefall under showers of spindrift before getting into the couloir. The first hundred metres above the icefall aren’t looking great. We think about turning back. We even go down about ten metres before looking at each other and saying, ‘Come on. We’re carrying on!’ A false start to the retreat, then.

It’s much better higher up and we’re glad we carried on. The last stretch of the couloir finishes us off. We take shorter and shorter turns breaking trail… Two elephant seals washed up on a beach. A quick rest at the top. That was hard work! The place is magic.

Then we drop into this beautiful couloir in ridiculous conditions, apart from the bottom hundred metres. We want to let the skis run, but our thighs start burning a little too quickly. From below the couloir to Glacier Noir it’s a powder feast. We’re yelling with joy and stopping every couple of hundred metres to cool our legs down.

The snow’s a little sticky on the glacier. No need to turn any more. We let the skis run all the way back to the car…