…this happens. Snow everywhere this morning and really chucking it down in resort…
Yup, after spending two season banging on about how good he was, and after I spent the same amount of time saying I was going Telemarking but never actually getting up there, Toby and I headed up for a wobble about.
I’m actually gutted to say Mallock ia actually rather talented, but I feel I put up a good attempt considering I’ve only telemarked twice, for about an hour or so each time, eight years ago…
Anyway, it looked like this (and yes the video is exceptionally fuzzy, but take it up with Sony Ericsson…).
Meanwhile it was absolutely boiling up there – possibly not the best conditions for me to hurl myself into the slush on skis that frankly look more than a little bit faulty by alpine skiing standards.
But despite the slush, sweat and sunburn I have to admit why all those slightly hippy telemark obsessed Scandinavians bang on about it so much and forsake a decent heel binding…
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Yup, looks like the carnage caused by the wet slides last week doesn’t look any less scary when you get close. This one started at Ba Combe and only stopped about 100 meters above the beginners slope…
Yesterday was a bit of weird one – from so windy and stormy that they shut the FuniSpace to perfectly still and sunny.
We set off in slushy snow and it was cloudy, then a storm really blew in and it dumped down with snow until midday, which was when Olly got stuck at the top of the FuniSpace with his clients as it had closed and the idea of skiing down in a blizzard and a white-out didn’t absolutely fill them with happiness. Fair enough.
By the time we’d finished lunch it had stopped there were about four inches of snow outside Carrrefoure, and by the time we got up to La Chaux the wind dropped and we found pockets of wind-blown powder on the piste up to foot deep.
(So all those instructors who though they’d magically been awarded Patantes simply because it had snowed didn’t actually need to go off-piste to get some decent turns for their clients – they just had to look…)
Then out came the sun and we spent about an hour thumping up and down the La Chaux Express until it shut. Brilliant.
And by the time we got to Chez Dany for a beer it was slush again.
So, we had the slightly impulsive idea of going up to the highest place we could think of and eating cheese, drinking Seb and Ben’s slightly dodgy Génépi and staying there for the night.
So we headed up to Mont Fort, skied down to the rather dramatic Cabane de Glacier de Tortin and set up camp. Somehow at one point we ended up turning the evening into a massage seminar but that soon passed and we got back to the serious business of finding out exactly what the boys had put in their moonshine. Oh and some weird version of snap Felix forced upon us…
The only thing that might put you off heading up and spending a night in the rather swanky Cabane might be the fact that sleeping at 3000 meters isn’t always achievable. Apart from that it’s brilliant, so get yourself up there.