Learning to Ski

So Monday morning. In Chamonix with the gang, all of who were working at various hours of the day. As the weather was so poor, and Ollie wasn't going to hang around, and the fact that I left my snowboard with Ollie at his place because it would cost me an extra £50 to get insurance to use it (I could have quite a rant about that.... I have a yearly Alpine BMC insurance policy, and they want an extra £50 to add snowboarding to that for the year. So I phoned them before leaving and asked to get 6 days of snowboard cover, they cant apparently do this though, so its either £50 for a whole year, or I asked for a separate policy, and its £104!!! But I can ski all I want... Though I can snowboard well and not nail myself, I cant ski to save my life, but apparently thats ok... I was so annoyed. In the end I left it as I could add the yearly cover at any notice, so considering so little snow is around I would try to climb more and not go snowboarding at all, rant over). Anyway, all that left me with little to do, other then learn to ski. So I grabbed Rhys' skis, which have been left in Cham, and hired some boots and got cracking. I figured it must be easy, as so many people can do it, and you have more ways to keep in balance then on a board. Really, how hard can it be?

On the chair lift

Sophie Lucy and I went to the Grandes Montets, the perfect place to learn to ski... I immediately stacked it getting off the first chair lift. Not a good start. My skis had minds of their own, one went one way when the other went the other, and I often found myself dragging my hands along the floor doing some crazy reverse snowplow whilst making some whining sounds. This was definitely going to be harder then I thought.

The easiest run on the mountain there was totally desperate the first time down. Trying to snowplow turn just wasn't working for me, until at the bottom there was a flatter bit, and here it just clicked, I made a few 'nearly parallel' turns, and it all started coming together. Soph and Lucy left me to go and do some proper skiing and for the rest of the day I made it my mission to get this thing dialled. I repeated this run probably 30 times. Every time I got better, until by the end I was much faster down then the lift was getting me up. Of course I stacked it every now and then, getting less frequent as the day went on. I was pretty pleased though. It definitely was easier then learning to snowboard. But sadly not as easy as I had hoped.

Rhys' skis he unconsciously lent me

I can sort of ski now though. I made quite a mistake at the end of the day, I wanted maximum value for money for my pass, so once my lift for MY run stopped, I descended right down to the valley on the red run, which on my board is one of my favorite runs. On the skis it was a horror-fest. Lumpy, steep, uneven, slushy, you name it. It took absolutely ages, and I fell more then i did all day. I felt like such a punter. I guess everyone starts somewhere. All in all a top day though. Now I'm ready to ski into some routes...