Crushed

That'll teach them for leaving me on the climb

The recent council announcement about being careful about landslides and avalanches seemed a little over the top in these first tentative days of spring, until my exploration of which mountain roads are now clear was halted by this minor inconvenience. Of course each one of those slabs of compacted snow would be enough to break your legs, and all together they would both preserve and slim your figure, in as much as you would be a frozen and flattened corpse, not on my preferred cycling agenda. Still, last time out with the club I was dropped on a hill, and oh what a terrible shame it would have been if the breakaway were passing underneath just as the snow itself broke away. Think of the wasted equipment.

This is the first time I have been turned back by an actual avalanche, and it looked as if the snow plough driver had the same idea when he came back and saw it. I climbed over with my bike, ever the optimist but only a few yards on the other side were clear.

Obviously, I need to invest in one of these:

On the way home I passed our very own mini Matterhorn, Gamou-Dake, from which the panorama used for the page title above was taken on a summer's day, big black butterflies in the air all around on the summit.

Gamou Dake, Aizu, above the Tadami river and route 252

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