The Roc d'Enfer Circuit

On Saturday we skied the circuit of the Roc d'Enfer. For those few of you who don't know the circuit is an 11km route from the top of la Grande Terche back down to the bottom of that station via la Cheverie which, for those few of you who don't know, is in the Vallee Vert which, for those even fewer of you who don't know is the next major valley west of the Vallee de l'Arve which, for the one or two people who for some bizarre reason don't know is the valley that we live in.

In other words, skiing down into the next valley is a Big Deal. And also very cool because you get the sensation of being in the back country because there are no lifts, very few other people, and beautiful Alpine forests you can just glide through.



The best bit is that throughout the entire 11km route you only see hear and use one chairlift and one draglift. The rest of the time it's just you and the mountains.

This was also an excellent opportunity to test out the GPS tracking feature of my iPhone. I'm using an application called trails and it's really cool. It produces GPX files which you can load into google earth and create the following visual masterpiece.



The vital statistics of our circuit are 11km in 47 minutes with a total descent of 1.4km. Neato.



We actually skied it twice to see if we could do it faster non-stop. This would have worked except that I decided to take us down some "powder" that turned out to be crust. People need to learn not to follow me!