Season Diary – Day 9
- Henry
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Monday 26th January 2026 – Champoluc, Italy
Thigh-deep powder is the answer to making any new(ish) resort tremendous.
I had skied Champoluc before, probably about 12 years ago at a rough guess. Back then, there was no snow, and staying in an all inclusive hotel right by the foot of the slopes I never got to see much of the town.
This was December and this was a freak weather event that saw the whole valley turned green, other than two ribbons of white marking the only open slopes. Freakish, yes, although regular viewers of the FIS Alpine World Cup circuit will know this is all too common with early season races.
How pleasantly surprised I was, therefore, to drop in over the ridge and follow the fall line through thigh-deep powder down a gulley, splitting the difference between sun and shade the entire way down, finding the beginnings of a slight sun crust to my right but beautiful, cold, soft, jappow-esque powder on my left.
This year Italy is getting hammered with snow. Absolutely battered. My last time in Italy saw it make up for an abject season with a foot-and-a-half falling in a matter of hours on my first morning back in February 2024, immediately covering the bare ground and giving us enviable powder to mask serious deficiencies in that season’s snowfall. Freakish, eh?
There’s a particular weather system that I’ve talked about on here before called Retour d’Est, literally translating as “return from the east”. Most weather affecting the western Alps comes from the west, the Jet Stream driving low pressure systems and weather fronts in off the Atlantic. Great for France, but very difficult for areas west of the Main Alpine Ridge who are often left hanging.
Retour d’Est is, at its simplest, snow coming from the other way. More than that, it is precipitation that is collected from the Mediterranean Sea, meaning it is warm. It gets pushed back east-to-west down the Po river valley, a huge flood plain running from just south of Venice to southwest of Turin. When it hits the Alps, which are devoid of foothills on this side of the ridge, the precipitation is forced to rise quickly, where it freezes and turns to snow. Lots of it.
The biggest dumps in the Alps are always Retour d’Est systems, meaning Italy is often reliant on feast-or-famine snowfall for its seasons.
This weather was made better by the fact that it is cold. It must be one of the coldest continuous winters I can remember in the UK, driven home by the fact that skiing is consistently available in Scotland for the first time in years. Mix in this Retour d’Est system with this cold weather sitting consistently across Europe, and this will create even more snow, even further down, for even longer.
All of this seemed slightly irrelevant in the middle of one of the best off piste lines I’d had all winter so far. A little sketchy on the drop in avoiding a couple of residual sharks, I turned in below my colleagues and had to make a sharp turn uphill to make the next ridgeline – being in front of the camera demands a little extra work to find the untouched lines.
From the top of the rock I sent it down this line, weaving over humps and between trees, between large rocks and down around tumbling fall lines. In all honesty, I put very little work in. I let the skis run but even then there was no speed to be had; the depth of the snow and the relative mellowness of the terrain put paid to that. Either way, it was such good fun to ski, and sent me whooping and hollering back down the valley.
It's so good to be back in Italy.
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