22
January
Base — 168 cm
Summit — −14 °C
Seven days without cloud. The high pressure sat over the western Alps and did not move, and the valley woke every morning to the same cold, exact, cloudless blue.
A week like this is not straightforwardly good news. Nothing new falls. The pistes go from perfect to firm to scraped in about four days, the north faces hold and everything else does not, and by Friday the good skiers had stopped talking about conditions and started talking about aspect and time of day.
What it is good for is light. In late January the sun comes over the Aiguilles Rouges at twenty past nine and leaves the valley floor at ten to four, and in between it moves through a sequence that anyone who lives here can name without looking up: the flat white of mid-morning, the long yellow of two o’clock, and then the twenty minutes at the end when the Verte goes the colour of a blood orange and everyone on the terrace stops mid-sentence.
We ate outside four days out of seven, at altitude, in February, in coats. The thermometer said minus six and the sun said otherwise.
It broke on the Sunday with forty centimetres overnight, which was received in the valley roughly the way rain is received after a drought.
Elsewhere in the log
Twelve entries so far. The season decides how many more.
Everything the house wrote down this winter, in the order it happened. Turn the spiral to look through them, or take the next entry below.
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