MegèveSki

Black powder...

We skied the tree-lined blacks on Mont d'Arbois today. We bumped into Lucy in the ski hire shop whilst Miche was trying yet another new pair of skis and she recommended the blacks since the trees would help with the visibility and the "waist deep power" would mean that we needed a bit of steep to be able to make any headway at all...

Since John was concerned that the whiteout would trigger his vertigo again we took it easy and got to the slopes quite late. I found some untouched knee deep powder and prompty demonstrated how not to ski it; one refreshing fall later we moved on to the blacks and they were very nice. They'd been skied quite a bit so they were choppy, lots of large soft bumps that you could rip through (most of the time).

We skied around, had lunch, skied more black in the afternoon and then headed home, skiing down the front under Caboche to finish. More powder falls in the soft stuff next to the easy red on the way back to the Rochebrune base proved that I still have a lot to learn about this stuff, but at least there's plenty of snow to practice in.

Whilst we were at lunch the skies cleared a little; we could actually see Mont Blanc for the first time in ages. We didn't have blue skies, but the cloud split up, most of it went high, some went very low and we had a strip of clear stuff stretching into the distance at the perfect height for us to be able to see what we were doing for once. There was a little blue, a long way away...

With any luck the skies will clear next week and the weekend Geneva crowd will head home and we'll have perfect, empty slopes under blue skies.