Hi!
Here is a short description of goals and projects for 2007-08 (e.g. project title, short description, place&date, partners, sponsors)
-Territorium: i make my own Freeskifilm with the Free-mountain team. The riders from the team are some of the best in Switzerland, from Big Air Swiss-champion, winner of the Salomon jib academy & young talented telemarkers.
My: Sponsors are: Cross, Irox, Glacier3000, Scott, Kästle
-Feel Adrenalin: Documentary film, I am one of 4 riders in this very interesting doc about the adrenalin in a big face, the doc is going to television and different festivals
Info: www.feeladrenaline.com
-Travel project with Tanja Frieden snowboard olympic winner: We try to go to the east, maybe china or Kazakhstan, the story is more for travel and lifestyle magazines.
-I organize 6 Freeski/Avelanche Camps in Switzerland with the Free-Mountain shop
-Maybe I will try to do the Quali for the new Freeski World Tour, I m not qualified because I wasn't in the events in the last two years.
Skiing the 3 Peaks Eiger, Mönch und Jungfrau, after I skied the Eiger I would like to ski all three mountains, first just for myself and if a magazin would like to do something is it ok ;-)
MEDIA GOALS FOR 2007-08 SEASON
- Companies like Cross, Scott, Swany, Free-Mountain, Glacier3000 and Kästle are working with me....
- With feel adrenalin we go to the television in austria, Germany and Switzerland
- I work with international Photographers like Peter Mathis, Rainer Eder, Stefan Hunziker and Markus Zimmerman, and try to do nice pictures for magazines like die Alpen, Planet Snow, Skiing, Ski Magazin, ADAC, Snow Activ, Box and some more...
-Movie tour in Switzerland with the movie Territorium (Premier in Interlaken)
-Organization of the rail-contest Pray4snow in Thun, check the movie on www.raiders.ch
-New i work with the project Pandaction/Snowdays together, its a project for human riding in the nature with the WWF, I am the only Freeskier for this project....
That's about all I think!
Sascha
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| SASCHA'S TRIP TO THE AREA OF THE ALETSCH GLACIER |
Without any doubt, the north face of the Eiger is one of the most spectacular views in all of the Alps. And we were flying straight towards it, a tiny airplane approaching the huge face, small like a fly in front of the empire state building. But I was not paying any attention to the Eiger. I was too distracted by what could be seen right underneath us: The Jungfrau Ski Area with the Kleine Scheidegg and the famous Lauberhorn, all of it with almost no snow left. A normal sight for late may, but today was the 25th of April.
Luckily, our destination was much higher up: We were heading for the Area of the Aletsch Glacier, 3600 Meters above sea level. The idea for this trip had come pretty spontaneously, after the agonizingly bad winter in Western Europe, something just had to go down. First we had planned a trip to Bulgaria, but the snow conditions there seemed to be about as lousy as they were here. Then we started talking about going to Kamtschaka in eastern Russia, together with Olympic Snowboardcross Champion Tanja Frieden, who, like me, is a Bernese Oberland Local. But Kamtschaka on short notice? Almost impossible to do, there are just too many permissions to obtain and too much logistics to handle.
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Go to North America instead? Virtually everybody was there at the time and we wanted to do something special after all. So here we were: My ski buddy Roger, Urs, a mountain guide and friend of mine and myself. Together, we sat in a Pilatus PC-6 plane of local specialist Scenic Air and headed for the eternal ice. Just how icy it was going to be, we all were to learn very soon.
For now, I dreamt of the few good powder days we had enjoyed this winter, while our pilot Peter Balmer steered the plane eastwards along the Eiger north face. We passed the spectacular east ridge of the mountain in a distance of just a couple of meters. What a view! Then we changed direction to the left and passed the backside of the Eiger, Moench and Jungfrau massif. And there we saw, what we had been looking for: winter. Underneath us lay the Konkordiaplatz, an enormous, almost flat glacier surface 2700 meters above sea level. I had been here more than once, but nonetheless, I was impressed.
The Konkordiaplatz is the origin of the Alps’ longest glacier, the Aletsch glacier and the ice here is an incredible 900 meters thick. That’s three times the Eiffel tower. No wonder this is a UNESCO world heritage. We crossed the Konkordiaplatz in a westerly direction and approached our landing spot: The Aebeni Flue Firn, a slightly tilted glacier surface at an elevation of 3600 meters above sea level. From there, we planned to ride down to the Loetschen Valley, a descent of almost 2000 meters in altitude. Peter directed the Porter across the landing spot to check out the surface. Of course, he had landed here many times before. But I hadn’t!
On the other hand, I knew that the Pilatus can land on a strip as short as 100 meters, and there was plenty of space. And indeed, Peter landed the ski-equipped PC-6 smoothly on the glacier and brought it to a save halt. We got out quickly and unloaded our equipment. Peter turned the machine around, took off and soon disappeared behind the mountains. This was it: Ice and Snow all around us. But what looked like winter, felt more like the inside of a microwave oven. The April sun developed an incredible heat on the glacier surface. And we still had to walk a little ways up to get to the entry point of our descent.
I foresaw that in terms of snow conditions, we couldn’t expect too much of this trip, it was simply too warm. We arrived on the ridge where we wanted to start off, sweating like race horses. Looking down into the bowl in front of us, we saw what was expecting us. The bowl being around 45 degrees steep was not the problem. But at the same time, it was all covered with frozen zastrugis and ended abruptly with a bergschrund, the crevasse where the moving glacier and the ice above meet. Not much fun there. But we had to go down; it was the only way to the Lang Glacier down in the Loetschen Valley.
We dropped in and let the bowl behind us as quickly as possible. After crossing the bergschrund carefully, we were on the flatter part of the glacier where we could expect better conditions. But there wasn’t much time: The sun was rapidly heating up the surface and hard firn turned into watery slush in no time. No wonder: So far, this had been the warmest April since 1865 in Switzerland, and it wasn’t going to change today. The colossal glacier formations we passed on our way down looked unimpressed, but we all knew that the glacier had melted considerably over the last years.
Urs lead the way around hidden crevasses as we were heading for the Loetschen Valley and for a short time, the snow conditions were okay. Not nearly as hard as we had seen at the top and not as slushy as we had to expect further down. But regardless of snow conditions: How could you not love to be here? The Bernese Alps above us were spectacular, the glacier landscape we passed through no less. We followed the Anun Glacier till it met the Lang Glacier down in the Valley. The rest of the descent was mainly about avoiding the many stones on the moraine. And the debris of the Anen Hut, for that matter, which an avalanche had thrown down on the glacier from its original location a month before.
Our destination, the Fafler Alp, lay in the green. We took off our skis and walked for the last couple of hundred meters. It was spring all around us and somehow, I had the feeling that we had just gotten back from a visit to a lost world.
- M Buhler
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It’s great that we have a few experienced foxes on Team Cross Ski and 32 year old Sascha Schmidt from Switzerland is definitely one of today’s most knowledgeable top level freeskiers.
“My occupation is a professional freeskier, ski instructor and freelancer” says Sascha. This is a guy who’s been there and back and who knows what is what. Sascha has often travelled to the hottest places in the world for advanced freeskiing.
Of course he has also filmed and taken photos with the other big names in the field and is today a so well merited and well known figure within freeskiing that he is invited to the different high status competitions. For example he participated in the Eurosport Yoze Games, Red Bull Snowthrill Alaska, Chamonix och Gressonay -06.
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| Photos by Hansueli Spitznagel & Markus Zimmerman |
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