Sadly, the weather forecast was correct. We woke to find it snowing steadily. Snow is good of course, once it is nice and flat on the ground, but on the way down it is annoying.  Two of the crew were  suffering the remains of a cold so decided to sit out skiing today. You can see the sense in this when you consider this was the typical view through my visor for most of the day.

Our skiing nearly went hideously wrong before we even started. We had skied down to the gondola and as I picked up one of my skis I noticed something odd. One of the 2 pins that hold the binding plate (and thus me) to the ski was half out, the retaining screw had sheared. This would have been interesting if I had not spotted it! We trudged up to the nearest ski shop and after much gallic sucking of teeth and ” ‘ow long ‘ave you had deese” it turned out that I was “very lucky” and they did have a replacement pin. After further searching of the shop for the appropriate tools the replacement pin was fitted, and the cost was negotiated down to “worth at least 2 large beers” so we settled on 10 euro.

So finally we got to do some skiing…. Top of Saulire to the bottom…

Then back to the apartment for lunch and to see how the others were getting on.

In the afternoon we stayed below the treeline. The problem with falling snow being that it flattens the light and makes it impossible to see any contours, this means you have to ski by feel, rather than being able to actually see which way the ground is sloping. As it was snowing, there were lots of lovely piles of soft snow building up (which of course you can’t see) which become ever more annoying. If you are skiing runs cut through the trees then they create shadows, which mean you can see the contours a bit. There are two nice tree lined runs nearby, so we played on those for the afternoon.

43 miles of not seeing where you are going is enough fun for one day.

Forecast for the rest of the week is much better!