couloir
Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- noun A deep mountainside gorge or gully, especially in the Swiss Alps.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- noun A dredging-machine which employs iron elevator-buckets on an endless chain and excavates by making a gully where the buckets pass.
- noun A steeply ascending gorge or gully: applied especially to gorges near the Alpine summits.
Examples
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To get down that tongue of rock to the lower snows of the couloir was a job that fairly brought us to the end of our tether.
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The snow in the couloir is a delight, turned sugary because it has sat untouched on the hill for so long, and we whoop as we ski down it, stopping occasionally to take photos, before we eventually reach a snow-covered road in a forgotten side valley.
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Kina had skied big lines in the Tetons for years; on many of them, if you failed to make the right turn at the right time, you would fall for a thousand feet, pinballing between the rocky walls of the couloir until you ragdolled out the bottom.
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Bivouacking on a two-foot-wide snow ledge, I was just below the notch that separates the two 13,200-foot summits, but above a sickening drop into a fifteen-hundred-foot-long steep snow couloir.
Note
The word 'couloir' comes from a French word meaning 'a strainer'.
