“It’s dumping in Martigny now! Might have scored on the weather for this week” I texted Krishna my train climbed out of the Swiss valley. It was later February, midway through (yet another) unseasonably warm and dry winter in the Alps. We’d planned this trip months ago, too far out to chase storms or predict weather conditions. The day before, I’d suggested that Krishna pack his powder skis, in case it snowed. It dumped. 

Krishna is an old friend from Colorado. We met in the Bear Lake parking lot in RMNP, and he joined my party heading to ski Dragon’s Tail couloir. Later that season, we tagged some of the sketchiest and boldest descents in the Front Range, including the aesthetic Y couloir on Mt Ypsilon. 

Taking the long way into Chamonix, I watched towns in the valley below disappear as tiny specks as my train climbed. The Milan - Martigny - Chamonix route is fastest way by train to get to the valley. From the Italian side, the only other option is to take a bus through the tunnel underneath Mt Blanc. Typically being more reliable, I opted for the train. The meter of fresh snow complicated things though, as my last connection from Vallorcine to Chamonix was delayed for several hours due to track issues and a malfunction in one of the cars. 

We spent our first day at Brevent, one of the (many) ski areas immediately outside Chamonix. After breakfast, we walked over to the bottom station, only to find the Aiguille du Midi closed, an all-too-familiar occurrence. With close to a meter of fresh snow, and cloudy, grey skies overhead, and ripping winds up high, It would have been surprising if the cable car had opened. Brevent was our second choice. We dumped our point gear and glacier kits back at the hotel and went to rip pow laps with light packs inbounds. 

The following day, the forecast indicated clearer skies. For a brief window in the morning, the Aiguille du Midi opened. We joined the hoards of guided parties in the line, and packing into floating tin cans, getting ferried some 9,000 vertical feet from valley to peak.

The already vicious weather deteriorated. Wind speeds increased, visibility decreased, and it started snowing. We were alone - the guided parties had long since scuttled down the glacier, and the Aiguille stopped running shortly after we arrived. In whiteout conditions, we attempted to find the crevasse-free entrances to the ‘mellower’ routes off the mountain, failing to find the entrance to the Grand Envers and taking a modified version of the Gross Rognon. We inched along the glacier, suffocated in a grey-white mass. The ground and the sky were one, only occasionally some distant peak or couloir or rocky outcropping gave relief. Crevasses were invisible until they were just in front of us.  I navigated through some combination of memory and orienting based on the few geographic features I could see. 

Skirting the skier’s left side of the glacier, we found the lower icefall broken, leaving the once popular main descent down the Vallee Blanche cliffed out and unskiable. This was part of the Mer du Glace that my family had skied on one of my first trips to the valley. I’d been here less than 12 months ago and skied through clean. Now it was gone. 

Cliffed out, we threw our skis on our backs, roped up, and hiked back up the Vallee Blanche until we found a safe-looking spot to cross. The weather, increasing violent, was becoming a real problem. It almost swept both of us off our feet, and visibility was deteriorating further. I started running the mental calculus on how to survive if we couldn’t cross the glacier and feared a cold, windy glacier bivy might be our only option. 

Krishna and I crawled across the glacier on skis. Hoping to find passage, we poked, prodded, and peered around the glacier for crevasses. On the far side of the glacier, we found a route that seemed to connect, de-roped, and skied out to the long flat below us. 

Back in town, we talked debriefed. I’ve been incorporating a quick debriefing into all of my mountain experiences. A post-op discussion about what we did well, what we didn’t do well, and what we can do next time. Only under the relentless knife of honest self-reflection, can we learn and improve from our mistakes. As a team, we moved well, adapted well to deteriorating conditions, and displayed mutual technical competency with our gear and navigating the environment. We agreed that we could have moved faster and more efficiently, especially at the Cosmiques hut where we took off our boots, and I took a shit in their toilet. The delays cost us, and put us in the position of being alone in a whiteout near the top of the Aiguille du Midi, blindly navigating broken icefalls. Once we left the glacier, it snowed nonstop through the afternoon and late into the night. 

The weather forecast for Sunday looked like our best so far. Clear skies in the morning, no snow. Compared to the 90+ kph winds we’d just endured, the 50-60 kph forecast was tropical. We boarded one of the earliest trams up the Aiguille. From the station, we could see deep, s-shaped, trenches on the slopes down to the glacier. Stoke hit me hard, I came running back to Krishna after seeing the fresh tracks exclaining, “it’s on!” 

I was forced to dial back my psyche. Skiing for so long in Colorado’s Front Range has taught me many lessons about overlooking red flags to chase powder fever. People, all too often, caught up in the stoke and psyche of a powder day, lose sight of the avalanche warning signs. Plus, seeing other parties skiing down the slope was no indication of how safe it was - another heuristic trap. My stoke was replaced with ‘cautious optimism’. Out on the ridge, we hopped the rope and put our skis on. After a brief safety assessment, we descended, scoring thigh-deep turns from the Midi.

Only one party was in front of us. After another discussion about conditions at the top of the couloir, we both gave it the OK. Krishna and I set up our rappel with his newly purchased 48m rope. Stepping into my skis, I rappelled into the couloir. Between rocks and bulletproof wind board, I set up two additional rappels to reach the skiable section, leaving a purple double length runner and a locking carabiner slung on a rock. 

In the couloir, we picked our way down the wind scoured upper choke. A party dropping in behind us kicked off a rock the size of a bike wheel, sending it whizzing down the couloir. Once in the couloir proper, we found shin to thigh deep snow with a slight wind affect. Skiing from safe spot to safe spot, we continually checked in, watching each other’s sluff and looking for signs of the lurking wind slab release. Nothing moved, except our sluff, and as we descended, we felt more and more confident. As the couloir expanded, we found more untracked snow, and opened up our skiing a bit. Faceshots came readily, and I started linking bigger GS style turns, and racing my sluff to the next safe spot. Khrishna followed, ice axe in hand, linking clean, bouncy turns down the 50 degree slope.

Near the bottom half of the couloir, we skied into the sunlight and scored glory turns down bottom 1,500 vertical feet. “Are you fucking kidding me?!” I screamed - I couldn’t believe we’d scored the iconic line in perfect, blower conditions. 

From the bottom, we traversed over to the mid station of the Aiguille du Midi, but elected to follow some tracks down the glacier, and try to ski all the way into town. Weaving through the icefall, we found more pow on the glacier, and took it all the way to the valley floor: in total, 9,000 vertical feet of skiing. 

We dranks beers in town and talked about our decision-making again. Mostly, we were happy with how we approached and executed throughout the day; initially cautious, later opening things up. The only scary moment was when the party above us kicked a rock down, a situation we could have done little to mitigate. 

The following day, more bad weather rolled in. We made a plan to try to tour Col du Belvedere, an objective just outside Flegere. I was moving slow in the morning, and put my boots on lackadaisically. With ripping wind and cloudy skies, Flegere was slow to open. We picked our way out of the resort and tried to find our way through the bluffs and cliff guarding the entrance to our tour. We couldn’t, and turned back. After a few mellow laps in Flegere, we took the gondola back down, and killed the afternoon in the hot tubs at the QC Terme. 

Though it was disappointing, our trip felt like it already peaked. Faceshots down the Cosmiques only happens when the stars align and everything works out. By some combination of luck and timing, we were in the right place in the right time, and scored. Asking for seconds would be greedy. Besides, I felt mentally and physically drained by that point. Though my fever had subsided as quickly as it came on (I did not end up having coronavirus as I feared), I was worked from the past few days of hard skiing and postholing up the Vallee Blanche in a whiteout. Krishna’s bus left Chamonix at 3 am the next day, we spent our last  night bar hopping. As we drank, it snowed. It piled up on the Chamonix long after we called it a night. 

The next day, I made my way to Brevent for a few hours of powder skiing before my afternoon train. Only half the resort opened; the upper Brevent cable car (the access point to my target line for the day, the ENSA couloir) stayed closed. Still, deep, fluffy pow laps on Brevent’s lower slopes made for the perfect hangover cure. In the afternoon, once the sun popped out and the snow started to warm up, I packed my gear up, and left. 

Back in Milan, the coronavirus situation escalated. Within a few days, travel into and out of Lombardia was shutdown. The entire country followed soon after. My scheduled trip to Fieberbrunn to cover the FWT the following weekend was cancelled due to visa issues. I got one glorious day of trad climbing in the Valle d’Orco before the measures went into effect. Then, the curtain dropped, and all of Italy got stuck indoors.