J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by AllyG

Ian Wickham wrote:Yep passed the lot, I was a bit of a swot at school and of course English lit/lang was a hit with me as the teacher was a corker :oops:

Oh good :D

Are we back to wibbling again now? :lol:

(talking a load of amusing nonsense totally unrelated to the topic of the thread - for those newbies who don't know what wibble means)

Welcome to all newcomers to the Forum :D

Ally

Thanks Lota :D

You mean untie them and put them in your pocket to carry the skis in and out of gondola's etc.? It would be a bit of a bore doing that all the time. And how long are the ribbons meant to be?

They sound like an excellent idea. I was ski-ing along in a group lesson once in powder just off the piste and we came across a kids class and their instructor who had all stopped ski-ing to look for a ski belonging to one of the kids who'd fallen over and lost his ski. We joined in the hunt as well and it took us all ages to find it - it was well buried!

Ally

Thanks very much everyone for all this helpful info about powder ribbons :D

Where do you attach the ribbons on the skis and what do you do with them when you're carrying the skis?

Ally

Lovely photos Salski :D

I am feeling a bit sad as well, having finished my ski holiday too :cry:

Never mind - time to plan the next one now :D

Did anyone really get banned from this site? I thought we'd all just seen the light and turned away from our evil ways :lol:

I mean look at me - hardly a line of wibble anywhere these days! But I do miss the old days a bit, when Admin was after me with his axe all ready to cut off my head and sell my children into slavery, and I was the Wibble Queen outlaw hiding in the hills :lol:

Ally

Tony_H wrote:

AllyG wrote:But, as Tony says, wider skis are much easier in powder and you don't have to worry about your technique so much.



Ally

Eh?

Words of wisdom from my ski instructor, after he'd spent the week trying to teach us to ski powder, and all his life ski-ing.

According to him, powder specific skis are much easier to ski in powder both technically and physically, as compared with piste specific skis. Which is, I suppose, why people use them on the powder!

Tonyo74 - I have noticed that some ski shops say they can't provide specific skis to order, you can only choose from the range that they have available in the shop at the time you go there to hire them. In any case, I would have no idea what to order for myself, which is why I rely on their expertise to pick me a pair of skis for the week. However, I don't see how it could do any harm e-mailing them and it would be interesting to hear what they say :D

Ally

My advice would be to try and get to the hire shop when they're not too busy and 'butter up' the staff so that they're actually interested in you and what sort of skis would suit you taking the current conditions into account.

I always take what they give me, after I've explained things like my previous ski-ing history, and so far I haven't had to take a pair back except for the free waxing or sharpening service they do overnight. I reckon I usually get last year's models but that doesn't bother me as I think it's more important to get a ski that suits me rather than a bang up to date model that I hate ski-ing on.

The last few years we've always paid for the top quality skis and I do reckon it's worth it. But it generally takes me a couple of days before I feel I've really got to know my skis - their good and bad points and how to get the best out of them. And then I usually look them up on the internet to see if the official reviews match what I think of them - which is actually quite a fun thing to do.

I was rather sceptical about the skis I hired last week - they were fairly scruffy looking, pretty stiff and weighed about a tonne - I couldn't even carry them up the gondola steps holding them vertically in one hand (I had to use my other hand to take some of the weight). But I soon discovered that if I worked hard and got my technique right (which does occasionally happen) they went like rockets and carved fantastically fast through all the chopped up messy powdery lumps on piste and felt really stable even at high speeds. And as long as I was doing my part correctly and remembered to 'bounce' they were fine in the powder as well. And when I looked at the reviews they said pretty much what I'd discovered for myself. They were Dynastar Contact 4X4's which are apparently an adapted version of GS racing skis and really great fun to ski on. I would say they're the best skis I've ever been on - although if I got things too wrong they'd throw me off pretty fast :lol:

So - I wouldn't necessarily reject a pair of skis because they look a bit scruffy. But, as Tony says, wider skis are much easier in powder and you don't have to worry about your technique so much.

And, as Far queue says, if you can't get on with them at all or the conditions change, you can always take them back and swap them for a different pair.

Best of luck with finding a great pair of skis :D.

Ally

I got a French newspaper when I was in Moutiers on Saturday 7th Jan, Le Dauphine Libere, and it said that Val Thorens has had 5 metres of snow in 5 weeks which is more snow than anyone there can remember since 1970.

There also seem to have been mud slides (coulee de boue), trees all over the road, an avalanche, power cuts, and tremendous winds.

In meribel we didn't know anything about it until Friday morning when the electricity went off in the apartment block and then we found that none of the ski lifts were working. But they soon got one drag lift working, followed by a gondola to the beginners area. And by the afternoon there were 4 lifts plus the drag lift working but they were only giving access to the lower pistes in the resort, and there was no 3 Valley connection. By Saturday a few more of the lower lifts were working and as the day went on they gradually got more lifts and pistes back on line but I don't know if they ever got the 3 Valley connection back by the end of the day.

And in Moutiers railway station on Saturday evening we met a Dutch couple who said it had taken them 3 1/2 hours (instead of the usual 1/2 hour) to get there from Les Menuires and they'd missed their train back to Rotterdam (but they'd been given free replacement tickets for another train which was good).

I took some photos of the cars in the public car park in Meribel - it was really funny because all you could see of some of them was a sort of huge mound of snow with the tips of the wipers sticking up (because the drivers had left them lifted up), and there were several poor holidaymakers with shovels trying to dig their cars out.

Ally

tspill wrote:For info I am generally skiing with a group who are better skiers than me so I try to keep up when my technique isn't really up to it. I improved well with them last year. But it still takes me more effort to keep up.

If you're struggling to keep up with your friends I'm not at all surprised you're tired by mid-afternoon! Maybe you need to take some extra lessons?

Top tip from my instructor last week - he reckons the reason I get tired and ski more slowly than my daughter is because I'm ski-ing on two skis - apparently I should only be using one at a time so that I can rest my other leg :lol:

Ally