Asphalt 8 airborne fastest alps11/15/2023 Jaccard had spent enough time in the mountains to apprehend the danger of this sort of drift. Up ahead, the wind had gone to work on the fresh powder that had been coming down all week, whipping the snow into an enormous drift-a huge pillow-like mound, known as a windslab, or plaque à vent. If he found himself buried, Jaccard's radio transceiver-known in French as a détecteur de victimes d'avalanche, or DVA-was designed to help rescuers locate him. In his red canvas backpack he had stowed an airbag that, with the yank of a ripcord, could inflate during an avalanche, propelling him to the surface of the cascading river of snow. Poised on the ridgeline, Jaccard made a mental checklist of the equipment he carried: shovel, collapsible probe, walkie-talkie. Like many experienced skiers of the alpine backcountry, he took precautions. Of course, out here, Jaccard knew, things could always go wrong. Now he was eager to get moving he figured it would take them 30 minutes to reach the village. Jaccard and his two friends had trudged to this off-trail spot by taking a ski resort lift to the highest station and then carrying their skis uphill for another 15 minutes. It was a treacherous run, unsecured and unsupervised, suitable only for experts-the ultimate “free ride,” as he thought of it. Steep traverses, vertical crevasses, ice patches, and spines of black rock. With his gaze, he traced a path down to the village of Grimentz, more than 5,000 feet below, taking mental measure of the obstacle course before him. He took a long look down the backside of the mountain, studying the way the high slopes of Roc d'Orzival-a 9,400-foot arrowhead-shaped protrusion in the Swiss Alps-fell away beneath him. Joël Jaccard squinted hard in the bright light and shuffled in his skis. It was everywhere, spread across the face of the peak and down the rocky ridges like a thick layer of frosting on a cake and glittering against a cerulean sky. And way up here, high above the tree line, where the storm had wreathed the mountaintop, the only evidence of the foul weather was the snow that it had left behind. For days it had been snowing, but now the clouds were gone.
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