Intermediate Ski Touring Weekend Grand St Bernard Monastery 🇨🇭 March 2022

This is an action packed Swiss Alps weekend designed to give you an inspiring ski touring experience around the magical Grand St. Bernard Pass high on the Swiss-Italian alpine border.   Our March intermediate weekend progresses from our winter intro courses and provides an opportunity to do some longer tours completely away from any resorts or lifts.  There is also a remarkable base camp of the working monastery at the Grand St Bernard Pass 2469m.

The tours planned tours for this weekend present a physical and technical progression from our Jan & Feb intro courses with more climbing and some steeper touring terrain requiring a good kick turn and often the use of ski crampons.

March Intermediate Alpine Ski Touring Weekend – Course Aims

• Enjoy 2 days ski touring in the beautiful Swiss Valais Alps around the Grand St. Bernard Monastery
• Do some inspiring ski mountaineering journeys, ski summits, find the best snow possible and do some memorable turns and fresh tracks
• Refine the essential skills for ski touring & explore the boundaries of where ski touring meets ski mountaineering in this classic alpine touring area
• Spend an enjoyable night in the remarkable base camp of the working monastery at Grand St. Bernard
• Become more familiar with hut to hut touring and ski mountaineering to prepare for longer ski tours in future
• Spend a sociable weekend in the mountains and meet other like minded ski tourers
• This weekend follows on from our classic Chamonix intro ski touring weekends in Jan & Feb and would form a great springboard for doing our Spring intermediate ski touring weekend in the West Oberland.

One of the inspiring things about touring from Grand St. Bernard is the amount of ski terrain to explore, just check out all those red lines on the Swiss ski map!  Possible ski ascents and touring journeys include the fine summit of Mont Fourchon (2902m), Monts Telliers (2959m), Aiguille des Sasses (3014m) or one of numerous ski journeys in the area according to the prevailing snow conditions and weather.  Some time will be spent discussing information gathering and route choice during the weekend and thus how to tour safely and ski good snow!

Fitness, Off Piste Skiing & Touring Experience Required – Intermediate Weekends

This long spring weekend provides both a physical and technical progression from the earlier courses. Both longer days with more ascent and steeper terrain will be encountered.  So skiers need to be physically fit in order to cope with 1000m+ days of skinning at a pace of at least 300m/hr for up to 4-5 hours.  Previous touring experience is also required for this weekend with the ability to manage your own ski touring equipment during transitions and reliably do effective kick turns whilst skinning efficiently.

Steeper terrain is also encountered on the ski descents so guests need to be competent & confident skiing steep slopes of around 35-40 degrees with controlled short radius turns in varied snow conditions.  Previous use of crampons and axe is useful but not essential if you have all the other skills as we often don’t use these to concentrate more on touring with a light pack, and training can be provided at the time if required.

Please see our main course page via the link below for all course fee inclusions / exclusions and other course notes.