The Entreves Shoulder, Skyway
- Dave Searle
- Mar 10
- 4 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Skiing at the Skyway on a powder day is about as dangerous as skiing gets (in my humble opinion). There are no pistes, no markers, no avalanche control work done whatsoever. The slopes are south facing and this heats up the snow quickly and causes more issues with avalanches compared with more north facing venues. It's steep (read it's mostly avalanche terrain) and most of the lines are exposed to big cliffs or have narrow chokes in them. It's busy, some might even say overcrowded so competition and therefore a lack of methodical decision making is rife. You better believe people have serious accidents there every year and there have been many many fatalities over the years.
However... I see the appeal also, heck I've had some incredible skiing at the skyway over the years. 1300m runs in some of the most epic alpine scenery on the planet either straight down from the lift or with a short tour. I take guests there occasionally also when they've earned it (they show me they can ski, listen to instructions and also do some basic mountaineering).
This contradiction between how dangerous something is and how fun it can be is something that we have to wrestle with when it comes to skiing and skiing steeper slopes in particular. There are so many things that go into the decision-making of whether or not we descide to Ski something on any given day, but one of the most important things to consider is when there's fresh snow at the Skyway, the danger factor is much higher. Skiing here once the snow has settled more (gone through some melt freeze cycles) and become more stable is a much better option. Timing your run so that you end up skiing the south facing slopes around 1030 to 1130 is often the best and can give you good corn or softening spring snow with a lot less moving snow. Also, on those spring days, there might be less people that are skiing as well, which also greatly reduces the risk.
There are many runs at the skyway. Here are some examples and some thoughts of some of the main runs. There is so much more to say about each but hopefully this is a good overview for each one. Feel free to ask questions in the comments below!
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