MegèveSki

Snowboarding on Mont d'Arbois

I had a snowboard lesson with Lucy today. The last time I was on a board was around 5 years ago when I did "day 3" in Mammoth in fresh powder and finally managed to link some huge carved "super tanker" turns together and fall a lot. Prior to that I'd done two days of lessons in Tahoe which seemed to involve catching the wrong edge and slamming my body into the rock hard snow over and over again.

Miche was going to have a lesson too but her knees are playing up a bit so she decided that snowboarding and falling on them wasn't a good plan and she stayed home to rest them.

Today's lesson went well. We started on the baby slope at the top of Mont d'Arbois with perfect snow and nobody else around. After about an hour and a half I was exhausted but I could just about link reasonably small turns together. We stopped for a drink and then moved on from the baby slope to a green down towards the chair at the bottom of the Michel Dujon run. From there we took the blue down towards the Mt Joux chair and then did the green down the front of Mt Joux a couple of times before heading down to the Ideal chair and calling it a day.

I didn't fall as much as expected and had none of the "wrong edge slam" moments that I had in Tahoe. I improved quite a bit on what I could do in Mammoth and even felt in control at some points. I think Lucy said that the next lesson is "intimidating skiers with that scrapey noise" and "sitting down in the middle of a piste just below a ridge".