Ski touring from the Tête des Raisins to the Fournel with Sylvain: powder, an improvised plan, a wild couloir and some creative route-finding!
After yesterday’s great day in the couloirs of Ceillac, there’s no rest for the wicked! Instead of sitting in front of a computer screen trying to fix our shared website, Sylvain and I wisely decide to opt for a day of popow. We have considerably more enthusiasm and natural ability in this department than when it comes to resolving IT schisms!! If we can’t move the whole mess forward, perhaps we can at least forget about it for a while?
In these times of snow drought, you can already drive up to 1,700 m on the track above Freissinières. Thanks to a few patches of snow spared beneath the trees, we can almost keep our skis on the whole way up. These days, it doesn’t take much to make us happy…
We head towards the Tête des Raisins via the Crête des Lauzières, with no fixed plan and the powder radar switched on. The couloirs dropping towards the Vallon du Crouzet start flirting with us. We allow ourselves to be seduced for one brief minute of pure happiness!
At the bottom of the Vallon du Crouzet, our bodies are beginning to vote rather strongly in favour of heading straight home for a well-earned nap… But an unexpected phone call gets us excited about a traverse towards the Fournel. Plenty of unknowns, admittedly, but with the highly motivating possibility of a taxi at the other end! Some people never learn.
So back up we go towards the Crête de la Seyte, skis on our packs. From up there, a plan gradually begins to germinate in our little heads. Obviously, it’s a plan involving a generous dose of uncertainty, based on absolutely nothing except a vague photo taken ten days earlier from Puy-Saint-Vincent. The photo seems to suggest a fairly obvious way down from the top of the Seyte to the bottom of the Fournel via the Torrent de l’Alpet…
So we drop into the couloir in question, full of optimism and with our hearts beating a little faster. Very, very good skiing, but the bottom of the couloir is much drier than it looked in the photo and reveals ten metres of fairly steep mixed ground… Oupsss! Are we about to enjoy the pleasure of climbing back up everything we’ve just skied? On the left bank, there’s no hope whatsoever: cliffs and the whole shebang!
Eventually, it’s on the right bank that we find the little bit of creative mountain trickery that saves the day and opens the way downhill! A very broad ramp allows us to link up with the Torrent de l’Alpet. A superb atmosphere in this gorge hemmed in by cliffs, where we find some nicely transformed snow…
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