Why backcountry splitboard touring in the Alps is hard to beat

Backcountry Splitboard Touring In The Alps

And why you should always have it on your splitboard radar.

We love going to different destinations each winter season. Georgia, Greenland, Kyrgyzstan, Romania and Norway are crazy fun places to visit and the dual hit of a new culture and riding powder in different mountains is an addictive one.

All of our worldwide trips are pretty special, hand picked for their unique vibe, but we are, to a degree, at the mercy of the elements whenever we visit them.

Weather woes

These destinations have been chosen for their mix of alpine and tree riding so we’ll always be able to find a good plan B if the conditions demand one. However, there is always the outside chance of getting completely skunked on the odd day.

In Greenland an intense arctic storm swept through on the first day and it just wasn’t safe (or appealing enough) to get off the boat. However, that did mean we got to ride super fresh powder for the rest of the trip so it wasn’t all bad.

At the basecamp in Georgia, we’ve heard of big storms dropping 1.5 meters of fresh requiring a huge amount of management throughout the night, digging and clearing to ensure the integrity of the accommodation.

So, we can’t always mitigate the VERY worst of the weather if and when it comes through.

Splitboard touring in the Alps can be a different story

This winter season will be our thirteenth as a pure splitboard guiding operation and we specialise in UIAGM / IFMGA guided splitboard trips in the bigger mountains of France, Italy and Switzerland.

Location, Location, Location

Our position in the Chablais Alps means that, 95% of the time, we can circumnavigate the worst of any bad weather that comes through by driving for a couple of hours to where it’s going to be better.

If it’s cloudy in France at altitude we’ll search for the sun in Italy. If it’s low tide in Italy we’ll take you into Valais in Switzerland or we can hang out splitboard touring in Chamonix or Les Contamines in France, should that be the better option. All of this is possible within a 3-hour drive from our base here in the Abondance Valley.

Having friends in high places

We hold access to a network of Alps based UIAGM/IFMGA guides, sharing information on conditions in real-time means we can adjust our travel plans and manage the weather windows in different countries..

A guiding operation that’s set up to move

Sometimes we’ll not decide on where we’re taking you until the night before in order to deliver the best splitboarding experience possible. It can be a headache for the guides, working out where to go, but the results can be nothing short of spectacular.

On numerous occasions, when things have getting spicy storm-wise across the Alps, we’ve been riding powder in the sunshine while the rest of the region was getting hammered by snow. You can read about those trips here.

To find the best conditions in new zones

We all know the Alps are huge and that it would take a few lifetimes to explore all of the terrain on offer here so even if you’ve been on an session here with us before it is highly unlikely that we’ll take you back to the same place twice.

And locate the best places to stay

One of the great things about backcountry splitboard touring in the Alps is the wide ranging hut network that we can use. This hut network allows us to either chain destinations together, on a hut to hut trip, or base ourselves at just one of them for a few day’s.

The Swiss Alpine Club have 150 huts under their management running through Valais to the Grisons Alps. In France you have Fédération Française des clubs alpins et de montagne (FFCAM) looking after the refuge network and in Italy, nearly 400 huts fall under the management of Club Alpino Italiano (CAI)

Add to this the number of privately owned huts in the mountains and you can start to see the scope of what is on offer.

Hopefully we’ve managed to put up a case for the Alps as a solid, and hard to beat option.