Summer Break

We are taking a well earned summer break. No jetting off to Chile or even getting a few turns in on France’s threadbare glaciers. It has been a long season for us. In the last twelve months we have served over one and a quarter million pages of content. We have battled Russian and Chinese hackers and spamsters and fought off rogue Dutch robots. It all sounds like an episode of Doctor Who but the reality is hard work and much less excitement.

In the end our backcountry season lasted exactly six months. From the 11 January on the Dent du Crolles to the 11 June on the Pic de la Belle Etoile, around 40,000 meters of vertical. Great snow locally kept us in the Belledonne and Chartreuse mountains with just a couple of excursions, to the Bauges and Oisans. Thanks to our colleagues at [url=http://www.Bivouak.net]http://www.Bivouak.net,[/url] Luc, Ben, Laurent and Tom; Jeroen and Bérengère at [url=http://www.Skitour.fr]http://www.Skitour.fr[/url] and friends Oliver, Cyril, Renaud, p’tit Seb, Grand Seb, Manue, Lolo, Caty, Marco, Cédric, Guillaume, Katrine, Pierre, Lionel, Patrick who made the season. A thought for Bérengère and Nat following Nat’s serious injuries in an avalanche in May as well as the other people killed or injured during the season.

PisteHors.com is now largely self-financing. We sold around $30,000 dollars worth of equipment for Facewest.co.uk and Backcountry.com. This enabled us to improve the capacity of our web server and to invest in an automated weather station which should be bringing weather information and forecasts for the Grenoble region next winter. We also hope to have a Web cam pointing to the gorgeous Belledonne mountains and will be investigating solutions during the summer.

Over the year we have published around 180 news articles covering a range of subjects from ski resort news to backcountry accidents to avalanche information to environmental issues. As ever we welcome your comments on any of these, even, in fact especially, if you do not agree with our opinions. The aim is to raise awareness of a number of issues – how we use and preserve the mountain environment. To further this aim we have also worked on stories with a number of newspapers and television programs, mainly UK based. If you get the American Avalanche Association’s journal the Avalanche Review you may also have seen two of our articles covering Avalanche Risk Reduction Methods and last season’s backcountry accidents.

Like the first alpine snows we should be back early in October. Articles in the pipeline include a season long test of some budget gear – does it really stand up to the rigours of the backcountry? A review of the last season’s accidents, the final part of our coverage of France’s disappearing backcountry and a year after the Préfet Marcel Pérès delivered his report on financing French off-piste rescue costs we’ll be looking with him at who pays now if you have an accident in the backcountry.

Comments are now closed