Fourth Cham'Lines of teh 2015 season and Aurélien Ducroz is skiing a couloir that he scoped out last year during a trip with Stéphane Dan. It is a fantastic line but with difficult terrain and route finding with a snowpack that is rarely in condition: fresh snow, but not too much on a base that is hard and stable.
Luckily they found them on the 22 February 2015 with 10cm of new snow. Léo Slemett, was the lucky third skier. Just back from Andorra with a ticket to Alaska after competing in two pre-qualifiers of the Freeride World Tour.
"After 1h45 of climbing on skins to the col du Passon and a 15 minute traverse we were at the start of the line. Once we'd purged the entrance of the couloir (it had snowed the previous day) and checked the base was hard and stable as we hoped, we lanced calmly into this couloir of 1500 meters that dominated the glacier d’Argentière. Pure pleasure for eyes as well as legs, the more we descended the better it got.
In the funnel a first block of 5 to 6 meters high, right in the middle of the couloir, obliged us to fix a rope. Further down, after 1000m of skiing all the same, a second step blocked the line, not as big as the first we didn't get the rope out but jumped.
At the exit of the main couloir we took the moraine for 100 meters before skiing a second couloir that was 400m long. The lack of snow at low altitude mean we had to fix another rope to get over the moraine. All that was left was to follow the bed of the glacier to Argentière."
To sum up: a beautiful "high mountain" line, ideal conditions, some obstacles to get around. A fantastic day that got three generations of pure freeriders together.
Couloir Sud des Becs Rouges