Col de Berard

Thurs 20th: Made plans the day before to tour either Col du Passon / Glacier du Mort. Snoozed my alarm in the morning as I assumed Liam would sleep in. For the first time this season he beat me up and and got me out of bed. He was also ill and had been up most of the night. Double respect.

After mounting my bindings onto my Coreupt's for the first time since I bought them, we headed up to Brevent en route to Flegere. En route Liam informed me he'd forgotten his pass... I wasn't overly thrilled about this, we were already late. I went up for a few laps and bumped into Sunny, Dan and Gibbs.

Did a quick lap of top bin and the snow was actually pretty soft, then a lap of Cornu which was pretty slushy. Liam caught us up and we headed off. Sunny had done Mort earlier in the week and said it was awesome so tagged along.

By the time we'd battled the queues to the top of Floria and the start of the tour it was getting late, around 12. Sunny and I bootpacked the first couloir, whilst Liam toured up to get used to his skins. Some slight wet sluff had come down as we were going up. There was also evidence of slides everywhere regardless of aspect. Our original plan of Mort was looking unlikely so Col de Berard became the backup.

Bootpack up above Floria

Liam finally arriving

Snow down to the couloir below Mort was wind-crusted on the North aspects and refrozen on everything else, nothing special. After a traverse we made it round to our objective. To me I thought it actually felt fine, the top layer had slid two days previously, refrozen and started to thaw, there wasn't much free snow. I was actually more worried about traversing under NE slopes that hadn't slid en route to Col de Berard. I went with the majority though so Berard it was. After the traverse I opted for skins as it is a pretty steady incline. It was a nice stroll in the end. Great.

The long traverse

Skinning up

After a break and some photos at the Col we headed off. Snow at the top was surprisingly good until we made it out of the shaded aspects. In the sun it was crusty but untracked, so it was still enjoyable.

On the long, icy exit track I gave my poles to Sunny. Found him stopped half way along the track with one of my poles... snapped in half... just from poling... Wasn't annoyed at him, more the lack of quality as they were bloody expensive. Oh well, they agreed to a refund so can't really complain.

On top of the Col du Berard

The reward...

The f...