Overnight Ski tour with Georgia - Trient Hut to Aig. Tour to Le Tour
by overflow50
Day 2 of our over night tour we got up at a reasonable hour had breakfast served to us by the hut wardens then skinned across the Trient glacier to the base of the Aig. du Tour.
A lovely simul climbed scramble lead to the top of the South summit (at 3542m) unfortunately the North summit is 2m higher! We then down climbed back to our skis and clicked in for what should have been a 2000m vert descent into Le Tour. Lovely snow in the upper sections lead to nasty crust to unbreakable crust to great powder back to crust to corn then slush then a dead end above cliffs!
After we had climbed on foot back out of the dead end and traversed over to where we could ski down a little further we started to follow a guide and his party down through the combat skiing of bushes, rocks slush and general nastiness. Once we got sick of that we put the skis on the packs and started walking and sliding and plunging up to our waists in slush before finally popping out onto a path into town. The first 1500m of descent took less than an hour, the last 500m took somewhere over 2 1/2 hours and much much more energy.
Thankfully we did better than a guided party who we met on the last 200m of the path out who had been about 2 hrs ahead of us (they passed us as we headed up to climb the Aig. du Tour) and had not managed to find the path for most of the descent!
