19
December
Base — 140 cm
Summit — −9 °C
Grands Montets opened at eight and there were people in the queue at ten past seven, in the dark, stamping. Some of them come every year for this and would be embarrassed to be described as sentimental about a lift.
The base is thin still — sixty centimetres at the mid station, a little over a metre at the top — and the rocks are where the rocks always are. Anyone who knows the mountain skied it carefully today and anyone who did not learned something about the granite of the Argentiére basin.
The first descent of the season has a quality that does not repeat. Not because the snow is best — it is not, it will be far better in February — but because for four or five months you have been carrying a memory of how this felt, and for about ninety seconds at the top of the first pitch the memory and the thing itself are in the same place.
Two of our guests were on the first car. They came back at four, ate everything put in front of them, and were asleep by nine.
The upper mountain holds its snow well into spring, which is why people build whole winters around it. But the opening is a separate event from the season, and it belongs to the people who queue in the dark.
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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