A video/photo journey to Refugio Elisabetta

Last week Dana, Weeze, and I went to Refugio Elisabetta. We decided that we were getting too fat from our slothlike skiing habits and monstrous eating habits. With so much lift-accessed powder to ski, and so much food to get for free from Gianni - the gay barista who has taken a liking to me – we aren’t really culpable. Blame the system, man. Regardless of the cause, though, we used our combined powers of deductive reasoning to infer that, seeing how much snow you can find from the lift and how lazy Italian skiers are, if we actually had to earn our turns, we would have first tracks for days. By golly, our prohibitively expensive college educations finally paid off. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

From the Youla cable car, we skied down into an untouched bowl.Our tracks are in the sun, but you can’t see them. Sorry. Then, we put on our skins and skinned up and over the next ridge, bootpacking at the top as the clouds continued to lift.

This put us into the top of an even bigger bowl, and we skied shallow, smooth powder

all the way down to the Lago di Combal, where the sun was shining on Refugio Elisabetta. You can see it right at the base of the pyramid in the middle of the picture.

As we finished the hour-long skin, clouds started to move in and we ended up with an inch of new snow, on top of the other few feet of untouched. We saw some old heliskiing tracks coming down to the hut, and we were worried about not getting any good turns. But the hut was comforting. Although it is officially closed in the winter, there is a room with mattresses, blankets, electricity, and a table. We could see why Italians don’t like backcountry skiing…

The next morning, we woke to bluebird skies, and picked out the most obvious line, as seen from the hut.

This picture was actually taken at 7 PM, after we skied the face for two days. You can see our tracks if you look closely, but the face is north facing so it is shady most of the day. This is what it looked like when we first skied it (credits: Weeze getting first rips with Dana providing the soundtrack):

Gosh that was good skiing. It was a hard and long skin to get there, so we headed down after one rip. But then we realized that it stays sunny until 8 PM now, and we skinned up the other way to the Pyramide Calcaire. We got to the col at around 7 PM, so the depth perception was way off and the photos are crap. But suffice it to say that we didn’t need depth perception for snow so powdery and untouched (possibly not skied this year).

And yes, it does drop off steeply below Dana.

The next day when we woke up after 12 hours of sleep, the clouds were socking us in. We decided to skin up to the same stuff, and when we arrived at the top, this is what we found:
Someone had skied everything out! Just kidding, those are our tracks (mine are the high ones, but that is Dana in the picture) after two days of skiing. Another prefectly sunny day! We took a few more laps on the upper part, and skied back to the hut after a second perfect day of skiing. The final damage looked something like this:

As you can see, we were making small, low speed turns, just like the italians., and there was nothing left to ski after the second day. The next day, we headed back into the front country. A whoppng hour and fifteen minutes from the hut, we were on top of the regular ski mountain again, attracting funny looks with our big packs.

The moral of this story is simple. The Italian Backcountry sucks. It takes too long to get there, there is nothing good to ski, and the huts are dumpy. The italians are absolutely right when they say that everything good to ski is groomed nightly. As for me, I might not be checking my email for a while. Please address correspondences to Refugio Elisabetta.