MegèveSki

Practice day, well more of a restaurant crawl

It was windy and cloudy today and the visibility was poor. This made the frozen snow with a light coating of fresh powder very annoying to ski; lots of small depressions with a bit of soft snow in them and lots of icy patches made for a requirement for lots of adjustments due to snow conditions and the flat light made seeing the changes in conditions difficult.

We warmed up under the triple chair, the intention had been to do some carving but none of the guys that I was with seemed to feel comfortable really going for it with the lack of visibility so most of us worked on short turns instead.

After a while the wind on the ridge where the triple chair runs was too much for us so we dropped over into the bowl and headed towards the drag lifts. The off-piste traverse was long and unpleasant due to the frozen snow and fresh stuff and when I got to the restaurant at the bottom of the long drag I decided to go for an early coffee.

Josh, Katie and Stewy had the same idea and we sat in the restaurant drinking coffee, eating chocolate and drawing patterns with salt (they must have really
loved us...)

Stewy and Katie drawing initials in salt on the table...

The results...

Josh doing Stewy's...

So, I guess you've worked out that the restaurant was a little dull but it was nicer being inside than outside...

We eventually left the restaurant and did a couple of runs on the blue run next to the short drag lift. This was better for carving and Neil and Ant had been doing lots of runs here. I continued to work on keeping my weight forward on my carves and short turns, looking for that 'just right' hip angulation feeling... The conditions still weren't ideal but it was better than earlier. Since Neil and Ant hadn't stopped for a coffee they decided on an early lunch so I joined then and headed over to Viento Cero. The bump runs down were a mistake, the combination of large irregular bumps, frozen conditions and a smattering of fresh snow made them hard work...

Lunch wasn't that good, since this was our day off the restaurant wasn't obliged to serve us for free, but they did, we had hot dogs and decided that we'd prefer a steak sandwich at Refugio Lynch at the top of the Lynch chair...

So, Militares up to the top, then a quick run down some bumps to a bit of a traverse over to the Lynch chair and then Lunch II...

Lunch II involved a steak sandwich for most of us (except Neil who just had a lemon cake and a chocolate with cognac in it...) with a nice bottle of Malbec between us...

We skied down to the quad and the snow was nice and we were all nice and relaxed... We took the quad twice and the runs were probably the best of the day, I even felt the 'right angulation' during my short turns at a couple of points.

Today was probably the most normal ski day I've had on this trip. The weather was pretty crap so we stayed in the restaurants and had fun anyway. Tomorrow we're back to work, no excuses, no coffee stops, just skiing and working hard...

This evening we had witten tests for our first aid and mountain safety stuff, not too hard (as we're all great sudents!) but slightly stressful before we began...