Up Close and Personal with an Icy Time Bomb

I have just made a successful Mont Blanc with a Mountain Tracks team of 5. On the way up to the Tête Rouse hut we passed all the engineering works for the draining of the subterranean glacial pool. There are thousands of gallons of water trapped in a large pool below the Tête Rouse glacier. If the pool bursts it will send a raging torrent down towards St Gervais. It's not as if it hasn't happened before. Last time this occurred in the 1800’s it killed a few hundred people. Now it's predicted to affect more than 9000 inhabitants should the worst happen.

I took some shots of the instruments used as an early warning. There is radio transmitter station connected to a cable running across the gully below the main glacier bowl. This is supposed to detect increases in water flow rate. I'm no hydrology engineer but it seems to me if you live in St Gervais you have about 10 minutes to start running up hill!

To drain the lake French engineers have been drilling and digging into the glacier and extracting the water using large pumps. This is lengthy process hampered by the recent poor weather in the Alps. I should imagine they are worried winter will come early and make working at 3200m impossible.

We had a snippet of these conditions last week where the temperatures at that altitude fell to -15degrees with strong winds and snow. Working in these conditions is impossible as all metal equipment starts to freeze. I'm pretty sure the engineers aren’t too happy working in these conditions either.

If the subterranean lake isn't drained in the next two months temperatures will hamper further progress leaving the problem unresolved until the spring. It is already having an effect on ascents of Mont Blanc and walking the Tour du Mont Blanc as certain paths are closed and the TMB train stops an hour short of the top. Due to this Mountain Tracks have been running some of our Mont Blanc ascents from the Aiguille du Midi as it’s a shorter return journey. Olly Allen Mountain Tracks Guide

Ski Touring Skills Weekend 4th - 7th February

On Friday I joined the first ski day of our Ski Touring Skills Weekend for a ski day in Megeve. We had a group of 12 with Jonny Baird and Klemen Gricar, IFMGA Mountain Guides looking after everyone. With a forecast of heavy snow we headed out of the Hotel Regina in St. Gervais to the ski lift at La Jaillet in Megeve, as we got to the top of the lifts the heavens opened with amazing heavy snow.

Working our way through the lift system and pistes we enjoyed lovely powder on the piste and headed towards the start of our ski tour for the day. Our aim was the Petit Croisse Baulet which stands at 2009m on the side of the Aravis chain of mountains, that splits the Megeve/St. Gervais valley from La Clusaz and Grand Bornand. This is a great little ski tour, especially for our gang of first times tourers, its a gentle walk to start with along a well established path before it slightly steepens and climbs through the trees to the summit; its also great in snowy weather as you have the trees for aided visibility and a good ski down.

The guides ran a session on "how to" put your skins on and adjust to bindings into walk mode and some basic skills on skinning, before we set off. Everyone caught on really quickly and was enjoying the uphill, as the climbed steepened the first uphill kick turns were done with only 1 or 2 fallers the basics of these turns were practised on the rest of the ascent.

At the top everyone had enjoyed the effort of going up, despite not getting a view of the mountains, we took skins off, had a bite to eat and headed off on the ski down. In the time we had walked up somewhere around 40cm of new snow had fallen so there was some good powder to ski between the trees. It got heavy low down and there were a lot of comedy falls and crashes in the snow, lost skis and plenty of giggles! We made it out on to the piste at the Giettaz ski area just in time to catch the last lifts back up to Megeve and home for a welcome cup of tea and hot shower.

No photos from this day due to the snow but Klemen took these great pictures on Sunday when the sun came out and the group headed out for a ski tour from Les Contamines.


Getting ready for the off.


Jonny reads the weather and avalanche forecast for the day


Jonny shows how to adjust your bindings for the uphill


Heading off up the hill


Wonderful views as the sun finally comes out


A quick rest for food and water on the way up


Richard enjoying the skiing back down


The team enjoy a beer and vin chaud at the end of the day