Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Chamonix – Sweden: Cruising north!

Yesterday Bjarne and I drove back north towards Sweden. After 18 hours, at 3 o’clock at night, we arrived in Orust to the Sahlén headquarters. Today, I’ll continue to Stockholm for some amazing times before we’ll return once again to the mountains at the end of the week!

My Saab, fully packed

Bjarne playing at one of the ferries

Autobahn at night

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

A powder day with Bon Appetit!

Today was my last day in Cham before I’m going to Sweden and I spent it in the best way possible – skiing powder and shooting with Tony Lamiche and the boys behind Bon Appetit; Victor Galuchot, Fabien Maierhofen and Nico Favre.

We started the day on Brevent and spent the afternoon on Midi skiing the Ronde and the Paraface. We had great weather, wonderful snow and perfect company. Now I´m already looking forward coming back to Cham again. Tomorrow will be a big day, when Bjarne and I are driving the 2100 km to Stockholm… Life is good!

Check out the awesome episodes from the Bon Appetite ski project at: www.bonappetitski.com!!!

The day started perfect. Parking like this where I’m from in the north doesn’t exist (there is so much space), so i must have been lucky!

Planing for having fun

Tony Lamiche in perfect pow

Victor Galuchot rapping past some ice to get in to a couloir

Tony, Nico and Victor at work

Fabien skiing one of my favorite runs in Brevent

Tony taking air

Tony and Victor playing

A majestic Glacier Ronde

Fabien on the Ronde

The boys playing in the exit couloir

Tony!

Tony and Victor

Victor, Tony, Fabien and Nico! Thanks for a good day out!

Monday, March 5th, 2012

A quick interview in town

In the midst of packing and office work I went down to town to do a quick interview for Finnish television with Kim Öhman (www.kimohman.com – Finnish only)… Now it’s full on packing because tomorrow might be a good day on the hill and on Wednesday Bjarne and myself are driving to Sweden for new adventures…

Kim Öhman in action

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

Just a random day – Chamonix

Daniel Rönnbäck (www.danielronnback.com) made a small edit from his and Erik Sunnerheim´s visit in Chamonix a few weeks ago (Swedish only). Check it out:

Just A Random Day – EP5 from Daniel Rönnbäck on Vimeo.

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

Ski touring in les Aiguilles Rouges – Mt Buet and more…

I went up Brevent this morning with relatively big ski touring plans, but as often in the mountains, things change. It took some time traversing the lift system from Brevent to Flegere, and I started walking up above the Index lift around ten. At the top I catch up with Max Turgeon and his friend Adam and then I continued out on the ridge towards Aiguille du Pouce. It’s a really airy ridge traverse that I have only done in summer, but it would have worked would the snow not have been so sugary. Now it was just too dangerous soloing slabs with bad snow on them so I dropped down in to a couloir from the ridge instead of skiing the planned north face. It was a great ski with transformed old powder and only about a ski with wide.

Then I had planned to do more stuff further east in the chain, but it was extremely warm and I didn’t want to climb any more steep stuff on south faces so I went for Mt Buet instead with the intention to ski the north face there. But when I got there I was in the middle of a big cloud and I could hardly see anything so I changed my plan again and went for the south face which I had never skied before. And what a good choice that was; 10 cm of corn with almost no other tracks visible on the skiers left side variation – all the way down to the Berard valley. It turned out to be one of my best skis for the season!

Clouds coming from the south

Adam and Max

Aiguille du Pouce ridge

Some great couloir skiing

My favorite view of Mt Blanc from Mt Buet

Thick fog on the north face of Buet

Great skiing down the south face

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012

Another day of photo shoots!

Today I went up with photographer Tero Repo and mountain guide Ulrika Asp to shoot some photos for next years Haglöfs catalogues mountaineering segment. We went up to Midi and managed to get some good stuff on mostly new locations. We even got some good spring skiing with huge bumps on Mer de Glace – damn its busy up there at the moment!

It was a great day in the sun and it’s always fun to work with Tero (check him out on www.terorepo.com) and Ulrika!

Tero with his new camera backpack!

Ulrika on a, kind of, famous location

Ulrika on the Midi-Plan traverse

Ulrika making a belay for some climbing

Photographer Tero Repo kicking ass as a ski model!

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

The Trappier couloir on Dome du Gouter

Today I went out again with Tony Lamiche for an easy ski tour. The goal of the day was to ski the Trappier couloir on Dome du Gouter, a run that’s straight up from our back yard in Taconnaz. I have wanted to ski this line for years and it was a great experience to finally get it done. As Tony needed to leave his daughter at the childcare we didn’t get going from our house before ten o’clock but that didn’t matter much as everything went smooth and we did the last turns down our back yard less than 5 hours later.

It’s really warm in Chamonix at the moment and it was a relief to walk most of the way up in the shadow, but after skiing a mix of excellent old powder and breakable crust at higher elevation we got in to the really rotten snow the last few hundred meters. It was alright though and the snow was easy to manage, but one does not want to end up in the wrong spot in that sort of conditions.