Pleased to provide...
I got back last night from very much a flying visit for the Euro mini. Arrived late on Friday night after a pretty much full day in the office. On the train up from Zurich airport, I got a call from Greg who had decided to head up for the day. We arranged to hook up. I had time for one warm-up run before I got the call from Greg so I headed over to the Trubsee lift station and met him there.
Visibility wasn't great but there was a bit of fresh snow (calling it powder would be too kind) so we headed over to Jochstock and did a few laps from there. I had looked at this area when I visited in December and the lift was closed and had certainly looked like it had potential. I hadn't realised quite how huge it is. You could spend days doing laps off there and never skiing the same line and each lap gives you about 900-1000m vertical. Very nice.
We then hooked up with a contact (never quite caught his name) of Greg's off a German ski forum. He was a local and agreed to show us a couple of lines. First we did the glacier under the Titlis Rotair cablecar taking a route which is good in bad visibility. This hugged the huge cliff face to skier's right of the glacier. We found some good snow but it was beginning to get quite wet lower down. Finally, Greg and I took the last Rotair up and did a run which went all the way to the valley floor - 2000m vertical. In good conditions, it is possible to do 1000m of this in a couloir. However, it was very warm and there would have been huge objective danger doing it this way so we took a different route to the side of the chute which descended by a series of big snowfields. As we got lower it got slushier and slushier so it ended up being a bit of a fight. But that run in good snow conditions would be hard to beat anywhere. This was all capped off when Greg's mate offered to pick us up from the end of the road - we had missed the last bus.
So props to Greg and his mate. Greg is a ripping skier and knows his mountain stuff. It was a real pleasure meeting him.
After all this action, we headed to the Yucutan and hooked up with Wildstyle and his crew and, after a bit of looking, Foggy Goggles and Hev.
Our plan to meet didn't quite work out after general disorganisation (on the Brits' part) and uncertainty as to what the time change would do to our planned meeting time. Still we managed to find Foggy Goggles and Hev later in the morning on a run off the Jochstock. They weren't hard to spot - even in a place like Engelberg, Foggy Goggle's hand painted Rossi Axioms stood out. It was very warm and most stuff at that level was really slushy. Fortunately, the sun had come out and there was good visibility so a run down the glacier seemed like a good idea. We had a blast tearing up open snow fields before taking on a couple of chutes. Unfortunately, I managed to give my knee a bit of a tweak on the second one (due to skiing like a pussy) so I called it a day then. I think Wildstyle managed to keep up with them for a couple more runs before the sheer GNAR got too much for him 
Despite a slightly low-key ending for me, it was a real pleasure meeting Hev, Foggy and their friend Jason - looking forward to hearing what else they get up to on this trip. They were scoping out a few interesting lines...
Oh and the physio says my knee is OK but that I should take it easy and stick to blue runs on my trip next weekend. I didn't tell her that I was going to La Grave
fur bearing, drunk, prancing eurosnob
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