The new 2015 Escapade – In a Day Possible?

Above is the new 2015 Escapde – note Mont Vallon and Le Praz (and no La Tania as that’s not needed as we start from there anyway – and we invented the Escapade in a Day – the history here)

Full Size Map of the new Escape here

Looks impossible at first look – but here’s an email we received… GOOD WORK!

Hi Toffa

We thought we might let you know about our first attempt at the 2015 Escapade today. We’ve done the previous full version a couple of years ago, but noticed that this year’s route seems a fair bit harder due to slight variations such as additional checkpoints in La Praz and on top of Mont Valon. Given the extra time required to do the route, and the fact that the piste and weather conditions haven’t been great this year we thought we’d report on our successful single day attempt (although with a couple of caveats mentioned below)

The attached image is a (rather scrappy) version of our route. I’ll do a better one and email it over at some point. Our final lift was the Foret lift in Le Praz, which we arrived at 5 minutes later than the official close time. We had to use some heavy persuasion on the guy manning the lift in order for him to let us through.
We also “cheated” in a couple of places where the check point on the map is shown as being at the bottom of a lift. We interpreted this as meaning that we had to visit the bottom of the lift, rather than actually travel up it. Therefore we went through the gates, but skipped out going up the lift, saving valuable minutes. We did this at Dent de Burgin and Plan de L’Eau. You’ll also note that the route we did starts in 1550, which makes for an even earlier start!

I’m sure that later in the season, once the lift times change and the weather conditions improve, the route will be possible even without our “cheats”, however with conditions as they are at the moment, this is the best we think we can manage.

We’re popping down to the lift station tomorrow to pick up our certificates and badges (if they are still doing them). The three successful route runners were (left to right): Aidan Dickson, Ben Waterworth and Claire Brown.

Cheers

Aidan