Soaked

GoreTex-SchmoreTex.  Today we got absolutely soaked through.  Just as i was announcing to Natalie that my gloves were holding up to the rain, i started to feel the first dampness on the inside and 10 minutes later it was completely saturated.

The weather really conspired against us today.  It's raining really heavily as high at 1700m so you get wet on the first chairlift, the the snow starts at about 1750m so, because you are now wet, it sticks to you.  Then, the strong winds start at about 2000m tightly freezing and locking in the snow.

 

Me, looking snowed-on.  The sign in the background says: "Danger of Death" because they were setting off avalanches and this is the reason most of the resort was shut.

This rain is disastrous for the snow because it's turning the soft powder into sticky, heavy, wet, largely un-skiable, slush.  This is annoying because we specifically headed out really early to get the good powder.  i'm pretty sure we were on the first lift up from Les Lindarets.  Les Hauts Forts was a blizzard again, lower down it was just heavy slush so we tried Chatel and Plain Dranse where the conditions were better but only one lift was open because of the extremely strong winds and very high avalanche risk.

Natalie in a blizzard.  Did i mention that we got a bit wet today?

So now we're going to try again tomorrow morning for some powder because it's supposed to snow all day today.  i hope the rain clears off by the weekend because loads of friends of ours are here next week and it'd be nice to have some good weather for their first week.