ZERMATT TO VERBIER | The Faction Collective | 4K

The Patrouille des Glaciers for me represents a crazy race. It’s a race that already, when we were young, we were connected to it because it was every second year there was this big hype around this race. The Patrouille is like spreading that thing of wanting to go touring more and more. The track of the Patrouille is following the most logical route from Zermatt to Arolla to Verbier, which is a great way also to scope lines. And on the mountains surrounding it, it’s super interesting. You have a lot of good lines, a lot of beautiful 4,000m peaks which are impressive at the one side, but also really inspiring at the other. And that’s a bit how this project was getting to life because, yeah, the Patrouille was cancelled this year and we couldn’t travel anywhere else so we said lets ski in Switzerland and lets do do the Patrouille and have a look what’s around there. The itinerary of the Patrouille goes through cols, valleys, over glaciers. It’s some really gnarly terrain actually and either side of it there are these huge, looming peaks that look incredible to ski so it was really exciting to kind of, sneak off the beaten track of the Patrouille and actually ski those big lines. There was really no one in the mountains and just to be there with only your friends is, like, it’s a gift, it’s so nice. For me it was a very humbling to be out in the mountains for days in a row staying in huts and just in general being away from civilization. It felt really nice and it was really eye-opening about everything that side of the mountains has to offer, which I don’t really know anything about. The unique thing about the mountain range is that you start in the crown of the Alps, in Zermatt you have like 38 4,000m peaks that are surrounding you. Then you go really like towards the chain of the Grand Combin, Mont Blanc and it’s really, yeah it’s the highest traverse in the Alps and that’s pretty amazing. And of course, our goal wasn’t to do the Patrouille in a racing style, because we are way too slow and we are focusing really on the skiing. We wanted to ski the big lines around it. So another early morning, which I don’t know why but it feels better than yesterday which is a good sign because today is going to be, I think the longest day. 2,000 meters of elevation and a lot of kilometers of traverse. And now we go up to the east face of Mont Blanc de Cheilon let’s hope we can ski the ridge line. The most challenging line was at the Dent d’Herens, because we were not really sure about what conditions we were going to face during the descent. And the second part was way worse than what we expected, it was a steep shoot and really icy. So we had to do a rappel and that was quite uncomfortable and on the two edges that was really on the limit of what we could have done this day. So we have to… eat a banana because… Elisabeth has to poo and we don’t have any toilet paper! I find it really inspiring to use that route to kind of access those exciting lines and inspiring peaks. I was just so amazed by going over all these valleys, places I’ve never been to and they’re pretty far away from most ski resorts that I know. So I was just super impressed and super inspired and it made me think that I should get out of resorts way more and go explore the mountains.

Channel: The Faction Collective

Views: 467,017

Keywords: ski, skiing, freeskiing, freeride, freeride skiing, zermatt, verbier, faction, faction skis, the faction collective, faction collective, faction verbier, faction zermatt, sam anthamatten, elisabeth gerritzen, yann rausis, patrouille des glaciers, pdg, anna smoothy, haute route, ski touring, switzerland, swiss alps

Id: GPi_JbWC5Qs

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020