MegèveSki

Free ski and practice - Day 3

Today was supposed to be rain and snow but the skies were clear and the sun was out; there was a little wind but it was generally pretty warm. I started the day with some off-piste runs with Chris and Wll. We played around on the off-piste to the side of the runs above the gondola. The snow was a little sticky and very wind-blown but it was fun to ski.

After a while we decided to cut across to the long drag lift and do the gulley that Neil and I had done yesterday; unfortunately the long drag wasn't running so we did one run down under the quad and then headed across to Condor II. The run under the quad was good, the snow was great, the new snow from yesterday had merged quite nicely with the original base and all the hard scrapey stuff had vanished. Over on Condor II things were similar, nice snow, a bit choppy, a bit soft but no scrapey patches. One run down and we took the T-bar back up and then cut across the off-piste down towards Viento Cero for lunch. The snow was great right up to the last face, as we came around the rock by the pylon and dropped down towards the trees and the Militares lift the snow got quite hard and crusty; Chris buried his tips, Will took a tumble and I side slipped most of it...

After lunch Tom and Joe joined us and we headed up Militares to play on the bumps. Egged on by Louis and Bengy, Max did a rather nice jump off of the largest cornice (15' drop?) next to the Militares lift. Ant and Neil decided to take a less severe route... We skied the bumps down from Militares and then cut across towards Condor for some carving... Well that was the plan, in the end we did a little carving on the lower section of Condor and then took the T-bar and Condor III and then skied the off-piste to skiers left of Condor III. We took this down to just above the top of the T-bar and then skied down to the left of the T-bar which had wonderful snow and was pretty smooth, ego snow, we carved it up and left lots of nice tracks. When we reached the bottom of the T-bar the cries of "more!" from all concerned meant that we did the same again, this time cutting lower on the off-piste and taking an interesting route through the trees so that we came out just above the area where we did our avalanche training. We then cut back towards the T-bar and skied the same ego snow in much the same way as the first time down.

A quick coffee stop and we started to head home, up to the top of Condor II and then across to Viento Cero via the off-piste and a slightly better route than before lunch; this time we cut down the steeper section to the right of the rock, a nice little chute, but unfortunately at the bottom the snow was similar to our previous route and as we dropped below the rock we emerged at the point where Will and Chris had had trouble before lunch. From there we skied back to the bottom of the gondola and then took it back up to do one last run down the Pista 6 bumps.

I guess you could say we practiced bumps and steeps and variable today; I suspect it's more truthful to say we just had a blast.