The cloud and snow returned today. This is probably the best snow we have seen in 25 years of skiing, but some of the worst weather as well. Having said that, in 25 years we have never had a single day when we couldn’t ski, which I suspect is pretty good going.
Anyway we skied over to La Tania. These place names will make no sense to most people, so here, belatedly is a map.
You can get the full map at http://ski-area.meribel.net/fileadmin/RM/Plan_des_pistes/plan_3vallees.pdf
La Tania was built as a new resort when the winter Olympics was in France back in 1992. The lift system does not seem to have been touched since then, which is slightly crazy. It is set up for families but only connected to the rest of the ski area by quite a tricky run, one more lift and it would be transformed. By contrast St Martin, a similar small satellite resort in the other valley has had its lifts completely replaced over the same period.
For the last run of the day we came back to our own valley and visited the “Moon Park”. Each of the resorts now has its own “park”, an area of snow shaped by the grooming machines into “whoops” jumps and all kinds of other things I don’t known the right terms for. Certain of the more suicidal members of the party like these places…. A new feature for this year is a system where you swipe your electronic lift pass at the start, then it videos you as you go down (one for clear days this) and then sends the video to your mobile so you can bore your mates to death with it that evening. We couldn’t quite be bothered to stand in the freezing cold trying to figure out the instructions so here is our own video. These bumps (sorry Whoops) are sooo much bigger than they look in this.
http://youtu.be/HU-2WUUqQUE&rel=0
This blog post was delayed by the author going down with the bug that has troubled the other members of the party this week, and therefore spending the evening running a temperature, moaning, and generally lying about on the sofa getting in the way whilst everybody else packed. Normal service will be resumed just as soon as we figure out what normal is…. Oh and there was a problem with the sledging video that has now been fixed, so if you are interested go back to yesterdays post and you should now see all of it. It turns out that uploading HD videos over the resort WiFi is a bit flaky…. funny that.
There is of course no such thing as a bad day’s skiing, just some where you can’t see as well as others, and some where you feel a bit secondhand at the end. So we will sign off with some skiing up high in the sunshine.
http://youtu.be/o8CjsILg-ws&rel=0
Thanks for reading