After coming back from the big mountain pro, Henrik Winsted and I met to start to go filming some lines around Verbier in Switzerland. What we found despite the winter being so kind with us was some quite wind blown terrain but with the chopper we still managed to get some good conditions. These where the first big lines of the season on the mythical face of « la finive » on the Emosson lake. There are two faces like this in the area, east facing, standing up above the rest with their 6-700 meters vertical sustained steep runs and both of them marked with these beautiful spines...

It's definitely spots that I like to get back to especially in the « beginning » of the season. I say beginning because this year especially I've been trying to force it and I noticed Again... that in february, the real big mountain season has barely been starting... Anyways, it feels great to feel again the atmosphere of these big faces, the real game.. it's quite something to be up there and get dropped on that kind of terrain. Power and forces are surrounding you making you feel really really small,... but alive.

Once again it feels great to be there with Manu Gaidet as a guide. He is really good at judging the conditions and find the right approach to feel comfortable in this world so full of surprises. His judgement is that the conditions on that face are good at least for the 2 lower thirds of the whole face, the rest being a little exposed because of the lack of snow due to the high winds. The runs we get to do, two really nice ones on that face and then one more gentle on a different aspect that's not good enough to make us stay up there, burn fuel and being so noisy in that magical. It's not one of  the most epic days but definitely one of these days where you build up some confidence, where you start getting these cool feelings at the end of your runs and where you kind of replace with it all the fears that your brain can build up when you're not up there riding. That's something that I've always noticed and that's really hard to control. The more you don't ride, or you don't do things up high, the more you start creating these bad scenarios and fears in your head and the only way to get rid of them is get into action. I know that darn well but I still get tricked every year... It feels great to take the time to go from that impression of being on the wrong place, complitely trapped by your fear, and to get to breath, take a moment to feel where you are and slowly that you get to be welcome and that you can swop that fear by the pleasure of being up there.

The day after that could definitely be the opposite... As a matter of fact, that confidence that we've been getting on that first day lead us to want to ride that beautiful “la chaux” ridge on the boarder of the Verbier ski area. That face is definitely a serious one, at least as much as the famous Verbier Xtreme “bec des rosses”. It's a little shorter, around 500 meters maybe even a little less, quite steep, but all the runs have tricky exits or exposed mandatory jumps on the way down. In good conditions I would say it's fine and the possibilities of such a face can be tremendous but we being a little too positive about the conditions  didn't expect to get tricked by the weather that brought us a good 40 cm of fresh over night. In the meantime we'd had organized heli, the biggest french TV news came to do a documentary about the whole thing and in total we had 4 cameras to film that beauty on a sunset line with the idea of sleeping in he hut facing the face... The dream scenario except that the conditions are not right. After checking the conditions, we try to convince ourselves that it's going to be very sluffy and definitely increase the exposure of the face but fine. This is the point where it becomes obvious that all the investment put behind us can become an unhealthy pressure and make us overcome some boundaries. A moment later, the sun starts hitting the face with that incredible evening line and we have to jump in the chopper and get dropped on the ridge. We all three know that we're going too far and that we're not on the right place. Our tension is abnormally high and we can feel that something is wrong there. Fair enough, two minutes later as we try to reach the entry of our runs, Manu goes first and on the ridge, all the little patches of compact snow created by the wind just break in slabs. That's already a first signal that makes us step back until further down on the ridge a big slab, 30 meters wide and 60 cm deep  releases when he traverses, but luckily under him.

At that point I'm quite impressed how easier and safer it can be to “force” the snowpack with skis than with a board. Anyways we come to our senses and decide to call the whole thing off. We call the heli to go down, all ways down being too sketchy seeing the conditions. We still decide to get to a smaller face that sticks out in the middle of that big face and have a small but quite intense run on that triangle. We believe that where it stands, the   snow won't be affected at all by the wind... right... Same thing! There is this funky layer that just doesn't hold the last big snowfalls and all we get to do is point down and be happy about that experience we got that evening. A good reminder that modesty is important when you're up there. We all claim it a lot after so many years of experience but we got once again tricked by our grid... After all, the result still came out good and the documentary was interesting in the way that we really pictured that day the “dark”side of what we do, the energy that we gather to organize these shoots, to scope and set up the whole thing and that sometimes things don't roll and no matter how hard you try, the mountain doesn't want you...

It is something that I respect above all and sometimes you have a bad feeling and you don't know if it's just your mind playing with you but at the end of the day as imaginary as people could think they are, these feelings matter and most of all for one reason because they mean that you are listening to the mountain.   I know that you'll be telling me “hehehe the crazy guy that speaks to the mountains...” but go up there spend some time up there put your self on some exposed ridge ready to drop in and tell me how you feel. Tell me if only human factors can help you up there. You'll defintly feel if you're welcome or not amd it's then up to you to listen or not...