Prolays

I'm having difficulty deciding whether I love it here more in the Spring or the Winter. We've been out walking every day of every weekend and never walked the same path or even the same valley twice.

This last weekend, on a rainy Sunday, we headed up to Lindarets which surprisingly is now a goat village with actual goats in it rather than a ski village. After waiting for the goats to decide that they were smaller than the Touareg we parked near the top of the Ardent bubble (which is being dismantled and replaced this year) and walked up the path that you can see in the winter from the Lechere chairlift.

This is Prolays now.




After marvelling at the most impressively powerful display of melting snow and heavy rain down an amazing series of waterfalls we walked back down the famous Prolays blue run. There's still snow on it and I tried some sandal skiing which is great fun until you get ice between your bare foot and the base of the sandal after which point it becomes unbelievably painful and you have to hop around like an idiot trying to dislodge the ice while your wife laughs at you. Then again skiing wearing sandals might be considered idiotic by some in the first place.

Intrepid

This awesome photo was taken on my iPhone a couple of weeks ago. It features my beautiful wife looking intrepid and atmospheric on the Arete des Intrets.

Working in Geneva

Is really not so bad.




Some of the time, anyway... However, I don't remember being able to do this during my lunch break in London. My commute has come down to 1 hour 15 minutes now that all the skiers have gone home. It's a long way but it's definitely worth it to live where we do.

The dude in the photo is my work buddy Aurelien who gives up a lot of his lunch-break time to teach me French. Carrément!

Interestingly, the bike he's riding is freely handed out by the City of Geneva to get people active, encourage tourism, and also provide work to asylum seekers. What a brilliant scheme!

In other news I've discovered the best way to learn French is to read the original Tintin comics in the original French. Mille sabords! Did you know that Snowy is really Milou? And that Calculus is really Tournesol? Weirdly Captain Haddock's name stays the same - not very French.

Commuting to Geneva

Is pretty.




Actually this is the evening view leaving Geneva. It's very pretty but it's also very long and riddled with nutcase drivers of both cars and mopeds.

New lines

One of the many brilliant things about skiing is that the mountain is always different. Even if you ski the same route twice on the same day you will encounter different snow - maybe faster, icier, slushy, whatever.




The thing I love the most about skiing is exploring! The amazing thing about the Portes du Soleil is that even after 6 years skiing here we're still finding new lines.

We recently found a new line down to Lindarets which is particularly incroyable because we've skied past this route and never seen it at least a hundred times. And it is awesome!

It involves some ravine crossing, bumps, and finishes of with an awesome super-steep (well ok maybe 45 degrees but that's still steep for me) section.

Steep

Now not only the name of an awesome film but probably my favourite type of skiing. As Doug Coombs said "I like the gravitational pull". Physically this makes no sense because that pull is always there, but what he means is the sensation of falling and then slowly arresting that fall as you ski back up the moutain on each turn. You are literally flying just above the ground.

Once you're prepared to let yourself go steep skiing actually requires very little effort. You easily launch yourself off the mountain. Sail for as long as you dare (in my case probably only about 3m) and then turn in, compress, and repeat. Fabulous.

Yesterday I had my most epic ski ever. An untouched powder line on a curtain ridge about 200m long at about 45 degrees. I bounced through the turns, throwing myself down the slope, hitting the powder, compressing, and then shooting back up out of the snow, making a flying, banking turn before hitting the snow on the descent again.

The best bit was that Natalie was across a narrow gully from me and had front row seats to the best ski of my life. Awesome.

Snow!

New snow!


I'm going skiing right now!