It’s a natural question to ask isn’t it?

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…

The premier of ‘Haute Route’ the movie. If you have 20mins to spare. Enjoy…

We were amazingly lucky with the weather considering that the forecast was for snow. We were up at 5am which is a ridiculous time to be getting up to do exercise. But we rose to a clear, cold morning which was stunning to say the least.

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…

It was good to finally make use of the sunny weather in Verbier. It was eerily quiet this weekend considering it is a bank holiday.

We thought we would celebrate Tom Renshaw from CK Verbier’s departure. Luckily he had tonnes of supplies that had to be eaten including line caught sardines (see pic). Thanks to Jono and Tom for cooking the feast..!

All in all a great night. Good luck Tom in France. See you next season..T

Well after what can only be said a wet, cold and misty May, finally we have sun. The high pressure over Europe is giving us wonderful sunshine. Time to make use of it so pitch and put later…T