MegèveSki

Fresh snow

The rain that fell all weekend in Pampa Linda was falling as snow from mid mountain. We missed the powder day yesterday but had a nice day of wierd and wacky wind-blown stuff today.

We were skiing with our BASI guy today, informal tuition that wasn't part of either of the actual courses but that is aimed to help us improve between them. We started on some off-piste to the side of the run down under the three man chair above the gondola. Some of the group had some problems so we practiced long, slow 'free-ride' style powder turns and short, bouncy, 'old-school' style turns. All good fun.

Then we cut across towards the sextuple and the quad and left these tracks in the fresh stuff...

Whilst we were coming down Jo had a classic powder fall and, since I was doing the back- marking, I helper her up and headed down behind her.

Whilst they were waiting the others found things to jump off of. This is Chris in the air, both of these pictures are from his camera. The picture of Chris was actually taken by Julian and he was laying down at the time, apparantly because the picture of Bengy didn't quite work when he was standing up...

After this we did a bit of carving practice off of the short drag lift and then some short turns where I managed to have one of those classic "pisted to non-pisted soft snow, hard turn, over the front, head plant" type stacks. I twanged my left thumb a bit, but it seems OK. After that we headed for lunch. The route to lunch involved an interesting bump run in which we had two people stop on bumps and then the rest skied down around them and each person stopped on the next bump and the person behind had one more person to ski around. Once we got to the end the first person skied around everyone else and we continued until we ran out of bumps...

Lunch, rest and then up Militares and left so we could come down the off-piste ridge, which was fun, and I'm SO glad that when Katie stacked it she was 12" to my left when she finally parted company with her second ski and ended up head first in the snow. Her second ski was sticking straight out of the snow about 3" above the backs of my skis.... It could have been nasty.

More carving and then we headed over to Condor II. A run down that doing some drills and then Julian split us up, a small private lesson for those of us with similar problems and free ski for the rest. Tomorrow the split will be different.

Another great day, my thumb doesn't hurt too much and it seems a small thing to complain about given how good the snow was. Apparently today's fine weather was just a small break in the storm, more snow tomorrow? Bring it on!

This evening we had a ski construction, purchase and maintenance lecture by a friend of Ivan's. It was good stuff. I expect we'll all be twisting and bending lots of skis before we ever buy them again...