Monte Rosa
Dead ends are annoying at the best of times, but in the mountains the only way forward is often dangling off a rope, inching your way down some sheer rock face.
Perched at the top of the Malfatta couloir I barely wanted to stand close enough to the edge to look down. This was a serious dead end. Our guide Giorgio was digging about in his rucksack for the rope and we ashen faced lemmings were doing our best at small talk. Looking down the drop was vertical, even going back on itself, I couldn’t even see a gradual slope. You’d have to be virtually horizonal just to feel your feet on the snow at all. Just before the rope ended there was a narrow ledge and it was there that we’d all have to perch until we’d all, one by one, got down the rope.
The waiting was hard standing on the ledge when your legs have turned to concrete. Normally, I think because I’m a girl I get to go first and get it over with. But a couple of the blokes were in a worse state of fear and got to go first.
When it was my turn I clipped the karabiner onto my harness and prepared to lean backwards over the lip. Once I’d propelled myself to that near upsidedown position, hanging over the cliff it wasn’t so bad. I inched down the top of the couloir and got to the ledge. Below the couloir stretched down to another ridge and continued downwards in a snowy wilderness.
Alagna is couloir heaven, if you like that sort of thing. You can pick your pitch 40, 50, 60 degrees and many of them you can access easily from the lifts.
To access the Malfatta all you have to do is take the cable car and ski to Punta Indren (3260m). At the top you follow the marked run that leads down the Vallon de la Pisse to the Balma basket lift, a bucket that is a step back in time. Where the marked run heads down the valley you continue a high traverse (left, East) for 1.5 kilometers, to find the steep entry at the point you can no longer traverse.
Earlier that morning we had skied the Grober couloir. It looks impressive from the cable car and is just one route accessed from the salati piste. From the marked piste it’s about half way down and just after a safety barrier on the left traverse beneath the Cima no Rosso. From there head for the Passo Zube reached by a 45 minute walk or skin (there’s usually a good boot track in) From the pass head directly down baring a little left and the couloir is very obvious funnel through the cliffs that guard the south flank of the Valle d’Olen. There’s a flat area at the top with breathtaking views where I lost my camera case taking photos with Mont Blanc in the distance.
The beauty of Alagna is that steeps and couloirs are at your finger tips, but so are long cruisey runs, cosy little restaurants with no menus, sublime pasta, and helicopters.
For years I’d wanted to do one of the longest helicopter drops in the Alps, 4,200 metres from the Col de Lys and now having done it, I only want to do it again.
This epic heli-ski day starts from Colle di Bettaforca (between Gressoney and Champouluc). You climb high over the tumbling glacier below the Col de Lys and see a spec in the distance which is the Margherita hut clinging to a ridge at about 4,554 metres. Suddenly you are dropped on a soft, flat snowy plane, miles from anywhere the views and tumbling blocks of ice are like nothing you have ever seen. It all seems so much higher and isolated than the top cable car or lift of a resort. You are surrounded by ice the size of skycrapers, gapping seracs, you are an ant, a tiny grain of sand in the desert. Time seems to stand still. There’s no rush to ski down or adrenalin buzz to distract you, simply the most extraordinary scenery, and stillness. From here you ski, watching for crevasses almost in a trance down the enormous Grenz Glacier between Monte Rosa and Lyskamm. It’s a long, languid descent. At one point we were weaving through the seracs so close to the ice that we could see its honeycomb format, the deep turquoise ice, glistening from the heat of the sun. Our guide Nick Parks hurried us on down a roller coaster of bumps and tunnels avoiding bottomless holes. As the ice gave way to moraine we found an area of fixed ropes where we had to take off our skis to negotiate the route until we reached the piste that lead into Furi.
Our journey took us to the slopes of Zermatt where hundreds of skiers blasted down the pistes. From there we took the Zermatt lifts to the top of the Kleine Matterhorn. To return to the Monte Rosa ski area and Champouluc we skied down the pistes to Plateau Rosa and then the pistes on the Cervinia side to the bottom of the upper Cime Blanches lift.
From here we returned to the isolation and off piste wilderness following a stunning descent under the east flank of Mt Roisetta until reaching St Jacques in the Ayas Valley. The lift from Frachey gives you access back into the Monte Rosa ski area.
Mountain Tracks started by UIAGM guide Nick Parks offers off piste skiing weeks, ski touring and tailor-made itineraries in Alagna and the Monte Rosa region. For details of winter adventures www.mountaintracks.co.uk