Chamonix stories from back in the day.

[mikael.oh]

All over my threads lately some people have been angrily insinuating that I'm lying or making things up, and I haven't responded.
Why? Becuse you don't reward bad behaviour.
I have nothing to prove, nothing to defend. I just do my thing and it brings me so much joy that it makes me want to share it and spread that joy.
Also, I honestly don't understand how people think like that. Going round thinking other people make stuff up.
I don't brag. I accurately describe what I do. I don't compare myself to anyone. Never in my life have I kept up with the Joneses. I don't understand why anyone would want to do such a thing.

I am however growing a bit tired of people who don't know me, who have no idea who I am, or how I've lived, who are triggered by what I post and subsequently have to make up stories about me just so they can feel better about themselves.


Therefore I thought I'd share some memories from back in the day in Chamonix to enlighten you as to how I do things, how we do things there, and to honour and remember my fallen friends.

This will be an ongoing series of posts as I have a lot of adventures to share and friends to honour.

Before my first season in Chamonix I bought a super cheap van to live in. This was in 2004.
It was so old and rusty that I painted rustoleum with a brush on top of the worst parts of the rust, just to make it slightly more presentable and help it clear the yearly checkup.
A friend and I drove from Finland, through Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and France, initially heading towards Verbier. She was going to work as a ski instructor and I was just planning on skiing.
When we got to Chamonix, fate intervened, and we got snowed in. The roads closed, and I wasn't sure the van would make it up the steep roads between Chamonix and Verbier, so I decided to stay in Chamonix instead.

I heard of a Finnish girl in a yellow VW van who was supposedly living among other vans in a parking lot. This turned out to be just across the road from the Aiguille du Midi cable car, and thus began my story of always living a stones throw away from this magnificent piece of engineering that takes you up to 3842m in about 10 minutes. My second season I lived in an apartment right next to it, and my third season I was back in a van, at the same parking lot as the first year.

We had a really nice conmunity with the vans and it was amazing to be able to ski fresh, dry powder high up in April and then come down to 20 deg celsius in the valley and just lie down and chill in the Sun.

Overall it was chill but we did have some run ins with the police. A French guy tapped into the electricity in a public toilet nearby, and then we ran extension cords connecting all the vans, so we could charge our batteries. Apparently someone overloaded the system and we were all called in for questioning. They wanted to charge us with energy theft but everyone played stupid and it went away.

Towards the end of the season I was getting pretty poor and was planning on heading back to Norway to make some money, but then I met an American girl at the end of season party in Grands Montets and ended up staying another month and a half with her and another American girl. We went on climbing trips to les Calanques outside Marseilles, and Finale Ligure in Italy, and had an awesome spring and early summer.
This meant that I was broke when I flew back to Norway. I lived in a tent all summer and worked for temp agencies. When I started my regular season job in the fall I lived in a storage room in the warehouse at work and pretty much worked 7 days a week until christmas and then took 6 months off again and headed back to Chamonix to ski, climb, and drink wine.

We'll add one more photo here just to shut up the people who are going on about Northern Norway like they're superheroes for knowing about it.
This is from the Lakselvtind massif south of Lyngen in Northern Norway. My Irish buddy Brendan and I started from Finland and did a ski touring road trip through northern Sweden and Norway. Riksgränsen, Narvik, Lyngen, and then Kvaløya. When Brendan flew back to Chamonix I needed to do some work somewhere over the summer so I stayed and worked in Tromsø since I was already there.

When Brendan died on the mountain in Chamonix a couple years later, that broke me. Friend after friend had died but this was different. I stopped skiing and vowed to never start again. I was completely devastated for a long, long time.
My last time skiing in Chamonix was with him, in the spring. Then he was on a splitboard that he got from Liz and we talked about how I'd never run into her and how eager I was to get to know her. Then during a devastating couple days in South America in the summer, Liz died, and Fransson died, and JP died, and then soon after Brendan died. At some point Rosenbarger died as well but I'm not even sure exactly when. It was just such a dark period in general and everything blended together.
Bird made a really beautiful tribute video to them that always makes me cry. I'm gonna link that here.
Learn how to be decent human beings, people. Disrespecting someone's dead friends is a line you don't cross, no matter how big of a piece of shit you are.

[lowangle al]

Sorry for your losses Mikael, it's tough to lose a friend. Welcome to the much safer world of xcd.

[mikael.oh]

Sorry for your losses Mikael, it's tough to lose a friend. Welcome to the much safer world of xcd.

Thanks Al!

I realised i forgot to add the first photo, of my first van. Chilling in the car park after coning down from a great day of powder skiing.
The dark blue strip at the bottom of the van is what I painted with a brush. Turned out great!

[mikael.oh]

Brendan and I had some awesome adventures together.
Once, in early January, I was flying in to Chamonix for a friend's birthday. As usual, I'd booked a dirt cheap flight to Bergamo, outside Milano in Italy and made my way to Chamonix from there. I knew it was too late in the day to catch a bus through the Mont Blanc tunnel from Italy to France, but I managed to hitchhike with a truck.

Made it to the birthday party and almost immediately Brendan said he wanted to do moonlight Vallée Blanche the following day.
I hadn't skied at all yet that season and needed to buy new boots, but thought what the heck, lets have an adventure!
The next day, hungover, I went to buy new boots and get a tight boot fit. Then we took the last cable car up to Aiguille du Midi and waited for the moon to rise. My feet were in excruciating pain the whole time, but it's always magical up there so I didn't mind. We watched a couple paragliders take off and then set off.
Vallée Blanche is the classic world famous 20km long off piste run that gives you 2800m of descent when you ski all the way down to Chamonix town, like we did.
Most of it is on a glacier with huge open crevasses, especially in early Jan. Guides usually don't start taking clients down it until March, when the crevasses are a lot more filled in.
Finding a safe line through it with only the moon for illumination was quite tricky and then we struggled to find the exit path that would take us off the glacier and onto the start of the ski through the trees down to Chamonix. It was a lot darker in the forest and we had crappy headlamps so it was slow going. Not enough snow to ski all the way down, so we had to walk quite a bit before we got down, in thr middle of the night. All in all it was a proper epic and a first ski run of the season that I'll never forget!

[mikael.oh]

I looked at a few different videos about Vallée Blanche to find one that gives you the feeling of being there and this is the one. The opening shots are incredible and give you a true sense of the magic of the place. I must have been up there probably close to 100 times, but it still blows me away every time. Just an incredible piece of Mother Earth.

[mikael.oh]

I started thinking about that time I set off a big avalanche and didn't even notice until after.

It was one of the few times I skied le Tour, which in many ways is the most dangerous of the Chamonix lift systems even though the terrain is the mellowest
There's a lot of grass there so the snow doesn't stick properly. From time to time a big avalanche buries the whole village.

Anyway, I was skiing powder with Magnus and Felix that day and it was my turn to have first tracks.
I set off down a short couloir that opened up into a bowl and just bombed down it, not hearing my friends shouting at the top of their lungs that the whole damn mountainside slid as I did my first turns. It wasn't until I came to a stop and looked back up that I saw what I had done to the mountain. Had I gone slower I would have been toast.

Neither Magnus nor Felix are with us anymore.
Magnus died on Mount Cook in New Zealand and we still don't really understand how. He just fell.
Felix died in the exit couloir off Glacier Rond, on the northwest face of Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix. This is a run we do many many many times every winter. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Magnus was a really cool Swede, and Felix was a really cool Frenchman who actually spoke English willingly and often and helped to bridge the gap between the French and the rest of us. I miss them both!