J2Ski group holiday to Tignes January 13th 2013

Glad to see you had epic conditions and all had a great time :D. 'Chapeau' to Ally G for a great job on the organisation front. I hope the rest of the gang bought you dinner on the last night -) !

Interestingly, it seems that a few of us are making the transition from on- to off-piste. We've probably all got little nuggets of information and advice to share. Here are three that I found particularly useful in Tignes in December:

1: For those of us that weren't taught the 'old school', feet together style: try to ski with your feet a little closer together than you normally would on-piste. I now make a point of this on many pisted runs too, just to get into the habit.

2: When turning, maintain a 'strong' inside leg. I was told that this, along with the narrower stance, helps the legs function more as a single unit.

3: Keep both hands within your field of vision at all times. 'Bang-for buck-wise', this was the single most effective piece of advice I was given. I instantly felt more balanced and planted when I did this. It's so easy too; until your core strength and, with it, your concentration starts to ebb away. Then it's incredible how difficult this simple act becomes.

I reckon a few of us have caught the bug now. What's next, j2ski avalanche transceiver boot camp? :lol:

One of Daved's photos - Felthorpe and Mr F :)



I don't know where they were in this photo, but when I found them on Thursday afternoon they were in the restaurant towards the bottom of the blue Combe piste, that you reach by going up the Palafour chair lift from Le Lac.

I found walking wearing ski boots, especially carrying anything, more dangerous than ski-ing :shock:

I had a nasty fall by the outside bar of the Panoramique on the Grande Motte on the first Sunday when I was ski-ing with Old Andy and CatP.

And then I fell again on Thursday outside the ESF office in Le Lac when I was leaning my skis against the wall so that we could give back our avalanche transceivers/beacons, and hurt my knee :cry:

And I was trying to walk upstairs in ski boots carrying a tray of food in another restaurant, the Marmottes I think, and nearly fell again! The Marmottes was a very good restaurant, with reasonable prices. It's above La Daille, at the bottom of the Borsat Express chair lift, and above La Folie Douce.

Gaz C wrote:
I reckon a few of us have caught the bug now. What's next, j2ski avalanche transceiver boot camp? :lol:

Hi Gaz C,
Thanks for your off-piste tips :)

Well, if you've been following this thread you'll see that I did set up a lesson with the ESF during the evening on how to use the avalanche equipment. It was free of charge as well :)

It's surprisingly difficult to locate a buried beacon, and without the tips from the instructor we'd never have managed it. Firstly, I wouldn't have been able to switch my transceiver from transmit to receive, as there's a sneaky little switch on the model we were using. And then, when you're walking, you have to keep it laid out on the palm of your hand facing the same direction. And if you walk too slowly it doesn't work. Plus, you have to know when to reduce the search area on the control. It starts at something like 40 metres. And at the start you have to walk in an 'S' to cover as much ground as possible. Once you get a signal you have to walk back and fore and at right angles to work out where the signal is strongest. Our instructor had us plant the avalanche probe/stick at each point where the signal was strongest, and then work around that.

We had quite a good laugh with him, and he recognized us later on in the week, on Sunday, when we were ski-ing around the resort without a ski host, and CatP and I had a good chat with him on the chair lift :)

I think I will try and set up some more lessons on this for the 2014 J2Ski group holiday. I found it very useful. And the off-piste initiation lesson with the ESF was very cheap too. It was a private lesson for up to 5 of us for 3 hours and it cost 160 euros. However, the instructor actually came and collected us at 8-30 a.m. from the chalet, and we returned to the ESF office in Le Lac at 12-30. I think maybe he gave us some extra time to be nice to us, and because we wasted a bit of time going to the ski hire shop in Lavachet and changing our skis for fatter ones.

Which brings me to another point - our skis.

I hired mine from Tignes Spirit Rentals, and they came to the chalet at about 10 a.m. on the first Sunday morning to fit me up with skis. I told them I wanted skis for mainly on piste but that also I'd be going off-piste on Thursday so they had to be OK for this as well.

They supplied me with Elan waveflex skis 168cm long, which had some sort of strange half rocker arrangement, which they said was very good. I've tried looking them up since I've been back and they do seem to be an all mountain ski but they're pretty narrow - 122/73/102. It took me a while to get used to them (I skied very carefully the first Sunday) but by Monday I could rocket about on them quite happily. I liked them because they were very fast, and stable, and in fact they did seem OK in the powder on piste on Saturday.

However, the ESF instructor didn't seem to think they would be any good off-piste, and we went back to Tignes Spirit in Lavachet and he got me some enormous incredibly fat skis :shock:
They were Movement Tattoo's, which seem to be women's Big Mountain/Freeride skis and they were 175 long. I looked them up as well, and I think they were 134/94/120.
It was a bit of a shock changing skis like that, and of course I didn't have any time to get used to them either. The ESF instructor took us down one short bit of piste, just to check we could all actually ski OK I suppose, and then straight off-piste into that crater where Daved hurt his leg.
I managed OK with those huge skis off-piste and by the time we'd got back to the piste in Val d'Isere I'd totally forgotten I had different skis on my feet. So I carried on ski-ing as I had been before, but our instructor was pretty smart and I think he was a bit worried about me and those giant skis on piste, so when I was following him at top speed he suddenly stopped and stood there looking at me to see how long it would take me to stop. And it was harder than normal - I couldn't do my usual sort of hockey-stop/emergency stop, but I side-slipped to a halt next to him without actually hitting him :-)
I don't know if he was planning on jumping out of the way at the last minute if I couldn't manage to stop, or not :wink:

I don't know if those big skis are always harder to stop, or whether it's just that I wasn't really used to them. I've never skied on anything like them before!

P.S. The others bought me 2 boxes of chocolates as a thank you, and Felthorpe presented them to me after our last dinner in the chalet - so they didn't forget me :-)

Those first skis you got really weren't any good for off piste at all at 73 underfoot, strange advice that.
You should have been looking at all mountain skis with something between 78 and 85mm underfoot really for being mainly on piste but with the option to buzz about elsewhere.

The stopping process should actually be easier on piste in wider skis as although you're going edge to edge slower, there's much less sidecut so you ought to be able to engage the full edge easier. Maybe it was just your legs tiring?

Tony_H wrote:Those first skis you got really weren't any good for off piste at all at 73 underfoot, strange advice that.
You should have been looking at all mountain skis with something between 78 and 85mm underfoot really for being mainly on piste but with the option to buzz about elsewhere.

The stopping process should actually be easier on piste in wider skis as you're going edge to edge quicker and there's much less sidecut so you ought to be able to engage the full edge easier. Maybe it was just your legs tiring?

You are going slower edge to edge on wider skis, not quicker, and for hockey stops you need to set edges more aggressively to get the same result as on more narrow skis. So on piste longer + fatter = more legwork.

Oops, Freudian slip now corrected, I meant slower edge to edge on wider skies.
I wasn't aware about setting edges more aggressively, useful to know.
Should people be asking for a more aggressive setting when having their skis serviced?

verbier_ski_bum wrote:[
You are going slower edge to edge on wider skis, not quicker, and for hockey stops you need to set edges more aggressively to get the same result as on more narrow skis. So on piste longer + fatter = more legwork.

Thanks Verbier_ski_bum - that was kind of what I thought - so I'd need practise on those skis to be able to stop fast. I think that's what the instructor thought as well!

The other thing I noticed about those big fat skis is that I fell over when going fairly fast over a small dip/hole on a perfectly easy, flat piece of piste :shock:
I'm sure that would never have happened to me on the Elans, so I can only imagine it was because those fat skis are more flexible and they sank into the dip.
I just shows that it takes a bit of time to get used to a sudden change of skis.

Tony - the thing is I did manage to ski off-piste OK on those Elan skis when I tried. I mean, in Joe's photo of me going down the Cugnai unpisted piste I'm on the Elans' - and the first time we went down it the powder was practically untouched.

And on Saturday I was fine ski-ing on the powder at the top of the Grande Motte (although I admit there was a hard piste underneath). And on Sunday CatP and I skied a bit off-piste/at the edge of the piste, and down an unpisted itinerary where there was loads of powder, and the skis were fine :)





I know that the blob farthest away in the middle of Spence's photo is me :)

This is one of Ade's photos - of Spence during the profiterole race :)
He did his best, but CatP on our table beat him by miles - she is a fantastic profiterole eater :lol:




Here is CatP (champion profiterole eater), and Brooksy, in one of Felthorpe's photos: