On 01 Apr 2010 11:03:31 GMT, Ollie Clark
wrote:

Ian Blake wrote:
Do they really mean anything?

I guess they're fairly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. They
are given for an entire resort AFAIK so they can't accurately reflect the
risk in any given part of the resort.

The rating was 3 in Tignes last week for the whole week but I saw one
small slide and one huge slide happen before my eyes and there
was evidence of avalanches on almost every slope. Several pistes had
been hit.

I've never seen so much avalanche debris! Certainly focussed the mind
on the tranceiver training.

One of the runs in the Grand Massif had blocks of snow piled all along
a hundred metres or more of the adjacent drag lift: it wasn't entirely
clear whether it was a manually-triggered avalanche or a
manually-triggered avalanche that was bigger than expected (there were
rumours of both), but apparently it took a couple of days to clear the
route of the drag lift.

There were several fallen avalanches when I was in Flaine a couple of
weeks ago, though all happened AFAIK before I arrived.

Oddly, the off-piste slope where last year our instructor showed us a
fallen avalanche, and nearly demonstrated rather more than he had
bargained for when another section fell away, looked OK.

--
-Pip