MegèveSki

Spring skiing

We skied with Ivan this morning and had an afternoon of free skiing, today the afternoon was planned to be that way rather than yesterday's accidental free skiing.

In the morning we started with a couple of warm up runs under the triple chair at the top of the gondola. The snow was softer than we expected, it was also very warm. Today I switched from my normal ski jacket down to my light-weight shell and ditched lots of woolly stuff. Pretty much straight away all of my jacket and trouser vents were open... It was going to be a hot day.

After our warm up we did some carving exercises with Ivan. We held a pole behind our knees to isolate our legs and did some turns with an early inside leg where were told to really focus on the feelings from our feet as we changed edges. After that we skied some turns with our boots undone, again to focus on our feet. Then we did some J turns with the aim of carving both skis cleanly through the turn and back up the hill; Ivan gave us a useful tip, to get a little more weight on the inside ski, and allow it to carve cleanly, you need to drop your butt in a fraction to transfer a little weight onto the inside ski... Seemed to work, though I can imagine there's a fine line between having the right amount of pressure and too much. We then dropped down towards the double chair and did some small turns on hard snow, looking to control speed and line, finally we did some jump turns on the same hard snow, again looking to control speed and line... Finally we took the lift to the top, did a long traverse and took a run down the boardercross course before heading through the snow park and on to lunch.

After lunch we free skied. Some runs down under Militares, some under Condor II & III and finally a blast back down past the lunch stop and over towards the gondola base. The snow in the afternoon was very choppy and spring-like, which wasn't surprising given how warm it had been all day. It was good fun, but hard work.