Exponents of the extreme

Inside the hermetic world of skiing the steepest alpine faces and couloirs.

Extreme skiing is defined, operationally, by the phrase ‘if you fall, you die’. The local scene is explored by an article by Caroline Christinaz in the current edition of the Swiss Alpine Club’s bimonthly journal. In 2016, a documentary entitled La Liste caused a stir: it featured two Valaisian skiers, Jeremie Heitz and Sam Anthamatten, skiing the faces of the Alpine four-thousanders.

Also making an appearance in this film was the pioneer extreme skier Sylvain Saudan, who died last year at the age of 87. In the 1960s, he was the first to publicise feats such as his ski descent of the 55-degree Spencer Couloir on the Aiguille de Blaitière. Even today, says Christinaz, extreme skiers often prefer to keep their activities to themselves or to reveal them only to a small group of insiders.

Fortunately, some steep-face skiers are more talkative than others. Gilles Sierro from Canton Valais is one of them. For him, skiing on steep slopes is a form of artistic expression and a way of practising mountaineering at the highest level. Last year, he skied the north face of the Dent Blanche, which is up to 60 degrees steep, thus completing his long-term project of skiing all the flanks of this mountain.

And in November, together with French colleagues, he skied two new routes on the south face of the Grandes Jorasses. The sport is not an addiction, he says, it’s more of a search. He keeps his binoculars always within reach, because the descent routes reveal themselves only bit by bit throughout the season. It took eleven years until the conditions were ideal to ski the entire north face of the Dent Blanche.

Sebastien de Sainte Marie is from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, but has lived for years in German-speaking Glarus, Chur, Näfels, Zurich, Aarau and Lucerne. Like Gilles Sierro, he has been skiing since he was a child, but he made his first steep descents in the Mont Blanc massif. "When I moved to Switzerland, I realised that you have to earn your descents here, not like in Chamonix, where you reach the steep slopes by cable car. So I learned to climb on foot," he says. And he also saw how discreet everything is in Switzerland: "It happens that a villager makes a descent that he has mooted for years – and perhaps he does it only once and keeps it to mainly to himself."

Skiing the north face of the Lenspitz
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

Due to its extreme nature, steep skiing is often viewed askance. Andre Anzevui from the Valais, now 69, experienced such incomprehension at an early age: "My father was a mountain guide and earned his living from it. He couldn't understand why I was risking my life on these slopes." Anzevui is the only person to have skied the north face of the Matterhorn, with some sections of 74 degrees. That was in the 1970s, but the scepticism towards steep skiing has changed little to this day. "Among mountain guides, the subject is almost taboo," Anzevui says: "We don't talk about it at meetings."

There is less talk about steep skiing in the German-speaking part of Switzerland than in the French-speaking part. The Lucerne-based mountain guide Marcel Steurer has an explanation: "The trends all come from the West. I myself would never have tackled a steep slope if I hadn't been in Chamonix." Steurer skied the steepest mountain slopes in France and Switzerland at the end of the 1990s, including seven different lines on the Mönch alone. But his achievements attracted little attention in the region.

"The mentality in the Bernese Oberland is different to that in western Switzerland, where the search for extremes is booming,” says Steurer, “In Germany, people are more cautious when it comes to risking lives." ‘Stei’ is now 52 years old and has two children. "I'm more cautious today than I was before," he says. "When I was into steep skiing, I always said that this sport was safe if you approach it properly." He has since changed his mind: "I've had a lot of luck."

References

Summarised from an an article Die Alpen 01/25 by Caroline Christinaz, Schattendasein einer Extremsportart: Steilwandskifahren in der Schweiz (German version).