I know, it takes a while to get to Bruson. It’s not like hopping over to Savoleyres. But when you do it’s brilliant – like you’re in a tiny resort miles from anywhere and the crowds and queues you get in Verbier are very quickly forgotton.

And it’s especially useful when Verbier close because of too much snow or high winds. Which is precisely why happened yesterday and how we ended up there…

Meanwhile the snow is falling heavily again and I get the feeling tomorrow might be very interesting – loads of snow but probably a lot of wind and not a lot open.

Here are the highlights…T

Beyond that, we all know (if you’ve done enough seasons) that just when you switch off and start wearing flip flops, then the weather turns and it throws down a few feet of snow. So let’s enjoy the sun and wait for winter to make a last minute cheeky appearance…

(PS is you read that there’s no snow in the Alpes, take it with a pinch of salt – yes, below 2000m it’s a bit iffy, and south facing resorts are in trouble, but nice high north facing resorts like, oh, I don’t know, Verbier, are holing up rather well).

It turns out it was a Toyota from the Verbier Festival in the stream of the Moulin..! Couple of beers mi’ thinks..! T

Firstly I would like to apologise for not keeping you good, loyal folk in-touch with the goings-on in Verbier.

But there really is no point in keeping you up-to-date on nothing. We lead a tranquil, slow-paced life here in the summer. Really – nothing has been going on for the past week.

So it’s good to see town buzzing again now, it’s also good to have a couple of weeks of solid sunshine. Thats much more like it.

As well as the festival we have a weekly market on every Sunday. The usual deal, pretty much cheese, honey and knick knacks.

But this week there were a few familiar faces with stands; Lucy Dunnet from donut designs had a number of her fab painting on show (see below). Also Jo Chandler from Petit Verbier stall lined the street offering face painting and a play area for the kiddies.

Once we made it up to Ruinette we waked over to the area by the Restaurant La Marmotte. We came across what can only be described as a Val de Bagne version of the Bath and West show. A proper agricultural shindig complete with the fizzy white wine (Fandant) and tonnes of melted cheese (Raclette). Just as were heading off the ‘main event’ started; The cow fight.

Now I thought this happened in Sambrancher or Le Chable at the end of the season. A kind of gladitoral going home event for all the ‘etrangers’ of Verbier. From what I gather this is qualifying. Which is hilarious. Not only that, I have recently found out there are different classes and weights. This perticular event was for 2 year old virgins..! I am not kidding.

Don’t get your hopes up, it’s a slow process, if the process actually starts. A number of the ladies were not keen to fight so were disqualified. Once a fight does commence there is no understanding of the rules. Only one thing can be counted on, one will win and one will lose. How they actually manage to determine this is completely beyond me….

|

|

|

|

We were on a mission to find a picnic area for some clients at the Lodge, the brief was to find an area near a lake but not normally accessible. Sounds easy you say. Well in actual fact it’s not as easy as it looks. The first problem is that you have to find some way of getting up high. Not all vehicles can make it due to the rugged road and snow residue.

Thanks to the kind people at Ski Armadillo we managed to borrow their Polaris off-road vehicle called Boris. As we climbed up from Ruinette we came across a pile of snow that stopped our progress completely. It wasn’t a complete waste of time as we trundled round to La Chaux where we found the perfect spot:

We weren’t the only ones enjoying the ride. We decided on the cheap way of walking Laika:

You’re talking to someone who’s fundamentally only doing a job for the winter. You’d ask a the bloke who drives a road-gritting lorry the same question. You’d ask the guy at the lift station (if lifties didn’t carry such an air of grumpy unapproachability). And you certainly ask a Ski instructor. Or a reindeer. Or Santa’s elves. Or perhaps our Kato.

So what are we doing?

Well, in an ideal world we’d all be sitting in the sunshine on the T-Bar terrace getting sun-burnt, but in this far from ideal world we all disappear off for a moderately nomadic few months.

So Nicol’s dashing between his building project in Le Chable and work all over the UK, Kent’s off touring round Sweden running the family catering business with Jenny and bringing his winning smile to the world of hotdogs and beef burgers.

Olly (who’s thirty today – wish him a happy birthday if you get chance) is off to New Zealand to teach out there for the Southern Hemisphere winter. Rich and Gina are back painting houses (and Rich is probably skiving off a lot to play golf).

Toby’s manning the office and taking Laika for walks in a rather soggy Verbier, Westy’s cooking in the dungeon beneath T-Bar and I’m in an equally rainy Amsterdam writing ads for Heineken (the research is killing me…).

But despite the fact that summer is only just beginning (well, it’s supposed to be here now but seems a wee bit delayed) our conversation’s already turned to winter 2010/2011, pre-season training, new skis and what colour uniforms we should be wearing.

Maybe if the sun decides to grace us with it’s presence we’ll get the bikes out and try not to wish away summer again. But it’s snowing up top today and you can’t help wonder what the glacier’s looking like in Saas Fee…

It reminds me of a quote by Chris Laidlaw, a Kiwi journalist. He was writing about  Rugby, but I’ll plagiarize it a bit here…

“[Skiing] may have many problems, but the gravest of them is undoubtedly that of the persistence of summer.”

Not long left now though – only four and a half months before TeleVerbier think about starting the lifts at the weekends…

Our walk around Lac du Dix to the Cabine was a hard slog due to the flat slope the majority of the way. It’s amazing how time flys when you have an iPod.

Day 3 saw us assent up to the highest peak Pigne d’Arolla at over 3,700m. A long but satisfying day. The ski down to Arolla was fantastic, great spring snow. a decent of over 3,000m.

We accented 1,800m up to Cabine de Bertol on day 4. Just the most dramatic scenery although at times it felt like we were in battle due to the amount of helicopters buzzing over head setting up the PDG. That night we stayed in the highest cabine in Switzerland perched on the top of a rock crop. The climb up to it was surprisingly challenging.

Our last day was a smallish climb up to Tete Blanche and then the long ski down the glacier to Zermatt. All in all an amazing experience for all. I would recommend the trip to anyone, pretty much regardless of their off-piste experience.

Video to follow….T

So we left Verbier on Sunday April 11th. Yes that is way over a month ago (Toby, Caroline, Rich, Clare). Obviously we have been very busy closing shop (bad excuse), finally I have some photo’s to share.

We left Verbier at around 10am (2 hours late fairly standard if you know Caroline) after a couple of diuretic coffee’s. After a couple of lifts we started our tour up to Rosablanche. We all started to suffer pretty much instantly, actually we struggled to walk up to Medran with our Rucksacks full off energy bars..!

After a wee bit of aclimitisation and sweat and tears we made it to Cabane Prafleuri.

More to follow…