Author: Pete Houghton
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Nearly a month after the last storm, We had an inkling of an idea that there might be some soft snow hidden deep in the guts of this seldom-skied couloir, tucked away beneath the stark and terrifying Nant Blanc face of the Aiguille Verte. Maybe we were being naive, maybe overly optimistic. Maybe we just wanted an adventure. The first known descent on skis and snowboard was done by Vivian Bruchez and Douds Charlet in February 2013. As far as I can understand, the second, but unconfirmed descent, was made by two huge names in the Chamonix steep skiing scene since then, but neither of them made any mention of it anywhere on Social Media, and one of them, sadly, has died since then. I don't know why they never claimed it, but that's their decision and it deserves a little respect, so I'm not going to mention it either. I don't even know whether it's true or just heresay, and it doesn't really matter anyway. It's only skiing. The thing about this lonely little couloir is that you can't see it from anywhere except high on the Nant Blanc face of the Aiguille Verte, or from the north couloir of Les Drus, so not many people get a good look at it to gauge the conditions in it, and even fewer people get the idea of skiing it. I managed to grab some helicopter footage of it on a birthday present flight a few weeks ago, and then we just happened to stumble on a photo taking during Ueli Steck and David Göettler's parapente descent from the Aiguille Verte, just a few days previous. The other thing is that the top of the couloir is a little tricky to get to, as you need to either ski down the Argentiere Glacier side from the Grands Montets and climb up the Gigord Couloir, which has a section of difficult-to-protect M4 mixed climbing; or traverse the Petite Verte on the Pas de Chevre side, descend the Drus approach couloir, skin up the crevassed-as-buggery Nant Blanc Glacier, and then boot up the couloir itself. In real terms, the approach is nothing compared to what you have to endure for many ski descents here in Chamonix, but then we also have to remember that because of a slow start to the season, the easy skiing down to the Montenvers train is a little dry and the moment and, to put it lightly, best avoided, which means that you have to go home the same way you came. All of this, when coupled with the fact that you can't even see the couloir until you are in it, has limited the amount of people willing to give it a go. So we accessed and egressed the same way: traverse from the top of the Grands Montets to the Drus approach couloir, rappel through some rocks, ski a steep-and-narrow gravel-filled ditch down to the Nant Blanc Glacier, and skin up to the base of the couloir. Once over an almost catastrophically-open bergschrund, and with the worst of the holes behind us (until we had to meet them again on the way back down), we swapped skins for crampons and booted up the couloir, an interesting 45 to 50 degrees for the most part, and pretty narrow in places. We found a mixed bag of snow, from pockets of facets to squeaky neve, from sluff-carved runnels to cold, hard boilerplate. Jesper, an absolute machine in the bootpack, made quick progress up the couloir, but just under fifty metres from the top, the sun, which was by now just licking the tops of the granite spires either side of the summit breche, had freeze-thawed the snow underneath our picks and crampons into bulletproof ice. If we waited another two hours, maybe it would soften it enough to ski, but we'd also miss the final cable car down from the Grands Montets. It's an easy decision to make: time to turn around, and ski what we've worked for. So we didn't get to the top. We didn't get to crawl through the tunnel under the stuck block to get to the breche, from where we could have seen all the way down to the Argentiere Glacier. We didn't get to ski another 50m of boilerplate. So I suppose, technically, we don't get to claim the third-ever descent of the Frigor Couloir. Does it matter? Nah. We left the lift with six legs, we came back with six. We got to explore a new area and spend time hanging out in some beautiful mountains. We got to play with ropes and things. We got to ski a little good snow, a little bad, and a lot of mediocre. But we still got to go skiing. The day was a total success.