MegèveSki

Just another day at Catedral

Today two of the three groups of skiers started their BASI Trainee Instructor course. We had been split into three groups for our off snow activities; the groups were random mixes of skiers and boarders and when the BASI guys arrived they decided to use those same groups for the ski groups. They wanted a mix of abilities and a mix sexes and the groups had that. Our group, group C, will start on Thursday when our trainer arrives. Initially we'll run slightly out of sync, we wont get our rest days over this weekend, but instead we'll get them early next week. After we've done the five day Trainee Instructor course we have a period of around 11 days (well, groups A and B will have 11 days, we'll have 8) during which we get to work on our problem areas in small groups and occasionally with the BASI trainers (we get three days with the trainers over the 8/11 day period). Since our trainer isn't here yet we got to do some training with Ivan this morning and were supposed to work with him this afternoon but due to unexpected circumstances we never actualy managed to meet up with him after lunch.

The snow here at Cerro Catedral has suffered a bit since we were last here. It's warm, lovely and warm and the conditions are suitably spring-like. The snow this morning wasn't that hard, but it was hard; this afternoon we had some slush and the lower runs are all very muddy.

We were the first people on the sextuple and the first on the quad. The picture below shows Chris eagerly waiting for the lifties to take the covers off of the gates at the quad for us.

The picture below is probably something that you're getting rather bored of by now, I'm afraid I'm not. It's the amazing view from the top of the quad down towards the lake. No clouds today, just blue skies and sunshine.

After several, very pleasant, warm up runs under the quad chair we met with Ivan and stared working on slow, controlled short turns, side slipping and edge control, garland turns (a little like a snowboarder's falling leaf) and plough-parallel turns. At lunch we discovered that this was similar to what one of the BASI groups had been doing; we seemed to have covered more practical examples whilst they'd done a little more theory. After lunch we free skied for a while until the time we were supposed to meet up with Ivan and then free skied for the rest of the afternoon after failing to find him at the meeting place (and at a second meeting place that he'd phoned the restaurant to tell us about...). We took a couple of runs down some of the moguls this afternoon, the main mogul runs are quite hard and scrapey but the smaller bumps under Condor II and lower down were nice and slushy and lots of fun.

We have one more day with Ivan tomorrow and then we'll probably have a rest day before we start our Trainee Instructor course on Thursday.