General

Wednesday, 11 April, 2007

Multivictim searches with the Tracker

We took a short look at the multi-victim search strategy with Gregory, who represents Salewa which imports the avalanche beacon in France. When the Tracker is first switched to search mode it locks onto the strongest signal in its search strip (you may have to cross the search area to pick up a signal if the avalanche zone is large). Using the five direction arrows and distance indicator you can follow the flux line to the first victim.

Click on the [CC] button for English subtitles

Posted by davidof at 08:39 PM
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Wednesday, 04 April, 2007

Vanoise Online

How much would you pay for high speed Internet access? 25 bucks? Not if you are one of the nine refuges currently going online in the Vanoise National Park in the Savoie. The project has so far cost a whopping 350,000 euros, paid for by the European Union and the Regional Government.

Refuge Felix Faure, Vanoise National Park

Posted by davidof at 08:17 AM
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Sunday, 11 March, 2007

8 months for ski instructor

A ski instructor, accused of manslaughter for not having respected his safety obligation towards his clients, has been sentenced to 8 months in prison (suspended) by the court in Nice. On the 4th of February last year Jean-Alexandre Echene, an experienced and popular ski instructor in the ski resort of Isola 2000, was hired by the Darmon family to guide them on some of the area’s off-piste runs.

Posted by davidof at 09:42 PM
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Monday, 05 March, 2007

Haute Route with Google Earth files

This is a short description of Haute Route with Google map file and snapshots of 3D terrain. The Haute Route passes some amazing natural environments traditionally starting from Chamonix in France and crossing to Zermatt in Switzerland although there are a number of variants. This guide is more GPS intensive and is provided with Google map files. Since we were the first party to do this in 2003, we broke trails much of the time. Our trip coincided with the first days of American-Iraq war.

Posted by ckim at 12:48 PM
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Sunday, 25 February, 2007

Winter Cancelled

The winter of 2007 has been one of the hottest on record in France with temperatures 3° to 4°C above average in some areas. The warm period began in the middle of March 2006 with only a couple of cold snaps at the start of June and August. The summer was sweltering, nearly as hot as the 2003 heatwave that killed an estimated 15,000 people. Although the last couple of weeks have finally seen some weather fronts move across France, especially the Western Pyrenees, Northern and Hautes Alps the snow line has fluctuated between 1000-2400 meters and snow levels have not improved dramatically.

winter cancelled
Lack of snow below 2000 meters

Posted by redac at 03:16 PM
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Black Diamond Test Centre opens in la Grave

American firm Black Diamond has opened a test center in the holy-grail of freeride skiing, la Grave. The French resort has a single main lift which carries backcountry sports enthusiasts from the bottom of the Romanche valley at 1400 meters to the Col des Ruillans à 3200m. With the glacier drag lifts skiers can enjoy over 2100 meters of vertical. What better test environment.

black diamond

Posted by davidof at 12:06 AM
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Friday, 23 February, 2007

The Trilogy: 17,000 vertical feet on skis and bikes in a day

Ski tourers like to pride themselves with their green credentials. After all they ski where the snow falls naturally and don’t use energy consuming lifts, earning their turns in the process. Is all this self congratulation justified? A recent survey by the French website Skitour showed that out of over 300 participants over a third were prepared to drive more than 160 km to go skiing.

the trilogy
Wheelie hard!

Posted by davidof at 03:14 PM
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Wednesday, 24 January, 2007

Ski resorts unite to save the planet?

Last weekend conferences at two French ski resorts looked into the future. Courchevel hosted the International Conference for Durable Development and Avoriaz, Wintersports resorts for a better world. The Avoriaz conference was attended by none other than Betony Garner of the Ski Club of Great Britain. According to the blurb faced with climate change, increasing travel and the need to protect biodiversity and a sustainable management of energy and water, winter sports areas are starting to act to manage the environmental impact of ski resorts and to design the ecological station of the future.

snow canon

Posted by davidof at 08:46 PM
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Google Earth zooms in on France

Regulars of PisteHors will know that we have been making some of our GPS routes and trips available in Google Earth’s Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format. These files can be viewed in 3D using the Google Earth application. However outside of urban areas resolution was a bit fuzzy, to say the most.

The Grand Sure, as seen by Google Earth

Now Google has teamed up with Toulouse based satellite photography experts Spot Image to improve the resolution Europe, and in particular the French mountains. The photographs from the SPOT 5 satellite is 2.5 meter resolution and we must say that for the most part the results are excellent.

Posted by davidof at 03:56 PM
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Thursday, 11 January, 2007

Scorchio!

If you are in a high altitude resort you may have noticed something strange covering the slopes this morning. A dusting of fresh snow at 1800 meters. Over the last few days there has been about 20cm of fresh but above the 2500 meters level but below 2000 meters the conditions have worsened from the already poor Christmas weak. The fault, record temperatures and rain.

alps 10 jan 2007