Fresh powder. Laying down fresh tracks. Awesome riding today.
We had a complementary tour/guide from Snowmotions today. We tooled up with ruck-sacks, shovels, probes and tranceivers – although we didn’t do anything with any real risk attached. In fact, for many in our group of six off-piste’rs, this was an introduction to riding in deep stuff.
Given that, we all did remarkably well. For sure there were tumbles resulting in boards being burried, but that’s all part of learning how to ride off piste. There was one section that required a fast, straight line, and we all came out on the other side. Great stuff. A little bit of waiting was nothing compared to the feeling of six friends riding through the powder on a blue bird morning.
Having the tour today turned out to be excellently timed. For the whole morning the skies were totally clear and the sun was out. Today was also the first time that the glacier in Laax has been open for a while. Of one of the lines we did today, our guide had only been able to ride it twice this season. Lucky.
The clouds did come in around noon, and when that happened it got a fair bit colder and the visibility was aweful. It kinda put an end to our session. In fact the last route took a fair while with low light and heavy snow.
We took a little bit of footage today, which was nice to look back on, but there wasn’t that much. Now that we’ve seen some good spots though we should be able to re-visit them and get some video.
All in all an excellent day. We’ve seen some great areas that we can safely ride by ourselves, and we’re sure to go back to. We’ve also had an introduction to off-piste safety and got some good local knowledge. Sick.