In mid May, when the spring snow starts to fade among crocuses, my mind starts the countdown to the next snow. Somehow, if not heading to the higher alpine crags, the rock climbing season also ends in May. It’s hot and humid the anti-season and it lasts till mid September. It’s long.
But for now, it’s five months of snow ahead, thighs to burn, new forests to discover and old couloirs to visit. With the new gondola in Borsa, last year we’ve been scouting a somehow new area that became more accessible by skinning over reasonable distances. We skied a few times, descending faces that we saw from the distance the previous years, both on the north and on the south, and spotted some lines for the 2022/2023 winter. Their time has come.
We also made it to some new mountains, some on the western flank of the Carpathians, some on our side. Snow was not always perfect, but there were at least two months of easy to find deep and fluffy white gold. We have now in the bag some very different types of terrain, from the beautiful backcountry hills of Bucovina’s Tapu Peak, where the trail starts and ends in people’s isolated homesteads, to Toroiaga’s impressive 600 to 700m drop spines. Last season we were up on Rodna ridge on the 15th of December. Maybe this year we can beat that!
