Vanoise (brief) update

'Interesting' is probably the word summing up conditions currently!

On Monday it was raining up to 2300/2400m at times, though it had also put down 40cm of new snow (and more) in places. Tuesday the wind picked up, though as per earlier in the season we seemed to escape the worst of it as most lifts (in Courchevel at least) stayed open on a day when many other areas had nothing but lower lifts running! The snowpack is massively saturated low down and there were literally hundreds of small wet slides on all aspects and even some quite low angle slopes.

As it happens I am off to Norway very soon for 3 weeks, but if I were heading out touring/off-pisteing in the Vanoise in the next while I would be exercising extreme caution due to the combination of lots of new snow, high winds and high temperatures...