MegèveSki

Esquel Day 1 - Slalom

La Hoya is a small ski resort. It's basically a single large bowl with lifts up the centre and lots of potentially amazing off-piste around the edges. Due to the lack of snow the off-piste was less attractive than it otherwise would have been. The plan for this week is some racing, some time in the terrain park and some all mountain freeride skiing on the off-piste. Given the conditions I expect we'll skip the last one, which is unfortunate, still we've had some great off-piste adventures in Catedral, so we wont feel too hard done by.

This is the view from the top.

The drive up to La Hoya is quite long, longer than the drive to Catedral, probably around 45-50 mins of slow going up winding, narrow, mountain roads. Still, at least the roads were clear and safe, given that barriers were few and far between I expect the journey up is more 'interesting' when there's more snow. The base of the resort is quite small, a restaurant or two, a couple of shops, a car park and two chair lifts. The chairs take you up to the mid mountain point, pretty much all the skiing is above here, there's only really a single run back down to the base, though there's some interesting looking off-piste had there been better snow. Once up at mid mountain there was a restaurant a drag lift for the nursery slope, a chair lift and a T-bar. The T-bar serves as access to the terrain park, the chair leads to the higher chair that takes you to the top of the bowl and the drag that runs to skier's right of that.

Us skiers have a pretty impressive team here in La Hoya, Ivan and Tano plus Sausie (all of these guys seem to have nicknames!) who's a race trainer that's worked with the national team and who used to race with Ivan back in the day. The guys had been up earlier than us, so when we arrived at the top they'd already set up a couple of slalom runs for us. We spent the day training on the slalom courses, with tips and advice from the trainers. It was actually quite hard to gauge improvements from one run to the next as the snow was softer than we'd have liked it and ruts developed very quickly. Also between your first and second runs 26 other people had run the course, it's fair to say that no two runs were even remotely similar which was a little frustrating but couldn't really be helped. Later in the day we practiced dealing with the huge ruts that had developed and, having learned my lesson on the race course in Catedral, when the ruts through me out I didn't fight it, I just let them through me and skied out. At around this time I realised that I wasn't actually trying my hardest in the slalom runs earlier; I could have pushed myself harder but I was aware that we only have a week before the BASI trainers arrive and that now would be a really bad time to pick up an injury...

The slalom was fun, it was little more than a taster but I'm now really looking forward to the 2 weeks of slalom training that I've booked up for mid November in Tignes. The key lessons were, stay forward, change edges quickly, aim to punch the pole with your downhill hand (yeah, that means your whole upper body travels OVER the pole).

In the afternoon we skied another slalom course which was set with "stubbies" (small tassels) rather than poles, the idea is that these are less intimidating and you're more likely to ski closer to them than poles when you're not that experienced... I actually found skiing the stubbies harder because I found that I had to look down the whole time and couldn't look ahead like I was with the poles.

On the way home the coach stopped a little way from the outskirts of Esquel and some of us got of and had a jog down to the main road where the coach was waiting and we stretched on the grass by the side of the road.

Dinner was at a different restaurant to last night, the food was better and the paper place mats were excellent building material for paper planes, soon the air was full of planes, though only a couple of us made ones that flew reliably well; it seems that the art of paper plane making is in danger of being lost!

During the day, those of us who had spent last night drinking in the pool hall found out that some of the others had located a proper bar, Moes. We visited for a little after dinner drink....