Every Skier's Dream

Every skier's dream conditions involve fresh powder and laying down new tracks in the form of perfect turns in pristine, untouched snow.

Natalie's tracks on the left, mine on the right.

And today, we pretty much got just that.  It's very late and my fingers are just about the only muscles in my body still operational, but here are the highlights.

Natalie on the Arete des Intrets with Avoriaz perched on the cliff behind her and Prodains in the valley below.

We skied for 5.5 hours non-stop and took in 19 runs, including: icy hard semi-powder bumps on the Arete des Intrets; the fresh powder in the Fornet Snowcross off-piste; the bumps on Cubore followed by the Abricotine off-piste; the off-piste on the other Cubore-chairlift side of the Fornet valley; the fresh powder on Les Tannes down in the trees near the Stash; and finally, we found a new way home down through the trees crossing Combe a Floret.

Natalie making perfect tracks on Fornet.

We also skied Sim's Gully, which, discovered by Sim when she was out here in January with Simon and Phil, is the first couloir just to the left of the Mossette chairlift if you look at it from the Swiss side.

Me skiing down the Fornet mountainside.  Note the knee-deep powder as promised and also the cool snow spray on my turns!  Please excuse the gratuitous use of the phrase "woo-hoo" in this video.

These names may mean nothing to you.  You could consult a piste-map if you were so inclined.  Or you could just take it from me that it was an absolutely epic day.  We were happy to find that, after a month without powder, we could still ski it.  In fact, we kind of think we graduated today.  We laid down some awesome turns in fresh powder which is certainly not something we've done so well before.

Natalie skiing down the bottom part of Sim's Gully.  That's the Mossette chairlift on the right and we're in Switzerland in this video.  This section of powder was much trickier than Fornet as it was very bumpy under the powder.  Please excuse the stalker-style heavy breathing from me at the beginning of this video and associated shaky-cam as i had just skied down myself and quickly had to whip out the camera to get Natalie coming down.  Oh, and the sit-down at the end is intentional!

There's nothing quite like skiing a section of untouched off piste, knee-deep in beautiful soft, fluffy powder, and then, from the bottom, looking up at your tracks and almost being able to get out a protractor and a ruler and checking that each turn was perfectly executed.  i say almost because, although we did make some rather good turns today, we don't usually take out a protractor as part of our standard ski equipment.

This is me skiing some off-piste powder on the Cubore side of Fornet.  Note the loud icy scratch as i set off - that's because until 2 days ago, there was nothing but grass and a bit of ice on this section of off-piste.  Again, the fall-down at the end is quite obviously intentional.