MegèveSki

Ski between 9 and 11 for best conditions

We put our skis into Duvillard Sport for a service last night. So far this trip I think I've probably saved around 120€ in service costs and I'm pretty comfortable with doing the work now but Miche's skis had picked up a little interesting base damage - not serious but it looked like it would be complex for me to fix with my ptex candles. And besides, I wanted to sit down with a beer last night and not spend the evening doing our skis...

We collected our skis at 8.35 and got the first bubble up on the Mont d'Arbois side at 9.00. The snow at the top was groomed, unfrozen, slush, which is bad enough later in the day but it was a bit depressing at 9am. Still, I expect we'd have been complaining if it had been colder last night and we had groomed, frozen pistes... We skied down to the chair at the bottom of the Michel Dujon black and the snow wasn't too bad. We skied the black for an hour or so, looping on the lift, and had some good runs. The snow was soft and well groomed and pretty forgiving which made for some nice fast runs.

It was quiet. A pleasant relief after yesterday; perhaps we're getting too used to the empty pistes here. If you waited a moment or two at the top of the run you could ski it alone down to the point where the red joined it, and most people seemed to take a breather. We eventually decided to move on when we saw quite a few more people (maybe 10) coming down towards the chair from the red down from Igloo; and the snow down by the lift started getting a little chopped up.

We headed down La Sources to the Mt Joux chair and skied off of there for a while. The snow was pretty crap at the top of the left run (viewed from the lift) but it was OK lower down and the brown at the top seemed to deter others from using it. The run to the right of the chair was very brown with lots of patches of mud showing though, didn't look nice at all, but the snow at the top of it looked nicer and more people seemed to be going that way than our way.

I ventured into the bumps under the chair and decided that the snow could do with another hour or so of softening before it would be as nice to ski as yesterday's bumps in Avoriaz; the snow was still a little crusty and I found it grabbed at my skis more than I liked - I guess I still need to work on that technique for crappy conditions.

After an hour on Mt Joux we decided that a) the snow was now too soft to bother with and b) all the lazy arses had finally got up. Deciding that we'd had the best of it, we headed up to Igloo for a coffee and then bubbled down.

Weather report for tomorrow suggests rain and perhaps snow from 1700m... We'll see.