Snowed Under

If you are a winter sports fan and have been following the start of this winter then I hope you are all very excited, because we have had a fantastic start to the season with excellent snow conditions. I heard last week that Bourg Saint Maurice; a town in the valley below Val d’Isere and Tignes, has had the most snowfall in December this year than at any point in the last fifty years. Moutiers is Méribel’s equivalent of Bourg, and it’s buried under snow as well. This is great for us skiers, but a pain in the neck for normal life.

The last two weeks I’ve been teaching over in Tignes in the great L’Espace Killy area. I drove over there, and parked outside the chalet I was staying in, thinking nothing could possibly go wrong with being parked there. How stupid. The above photo shows how much snow fell in just one 36 hour period. It took me and a few others quite a while to dig it out before parking in an underground garage.

The snow conditions improved after each weather front swept through. Whilst we were in the middle of some of the storms it was a pretty tough existence. Strong winds accompanied the snowfalls, and some days we only had two or three chairlifts that were able stay open, it became a war of attrition.

This also meant that the avalanche risk stayed sky high for a while. However once the weather calmed down we were treated to some magnificent skiing, both on and off piste. I was working for Inspire to Ski again, see www.inspiretoski.com. During the two weeks I had a mixture of ‘All Mountain Performance’ groups, a private booking and an ‘Off-Piste Performance’ group.

I was working with other British instructors and really enjoyed working together as a team. Each morning, lunchtime and evening we discussed each other’s plans and collectively decided on the best areas to ski depending on the ski lift status.

When skiing off-piste the snow was so deep we sometimes couldn’t move. The normal solution to this is to find steeper slopes where gravity helps pull the skier through the deep powder. But because of the high avalanche risk our choices using steep slopes were limited.

It was a delicate balance of finding safe but also fun slopes to ski on. However later in the second week more terrain became available to us, especially over in Val d’Isere, and we made the most of it. One member of the group decided on checking out the local wildlife buried down in the snow, or so I was told!

It was a fantastic start to my teaching this winter, and I can’t wait to continue this week. It would take me ages to list all the names I skied with over the last two weeks, so I’ll just do a collective ‘thank you’ to you all.

I’m safely back in Méribel this weekend, and start work again tomorrow with eight straight days of work before Christmas Day. If you are coming out skiing over the holiday period I hope you have a fantastic trip. I can guarantee you one thing, you won’t be short of snow. Especially because we’ve got even more forecast over the next three days. Live with passion.

Martin