J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by Ranchero_1979

And we know what snow in Tuscany means :-), 2018 should be a great vintage, something we can all cheer about.

1/2 the problem is the mentality of skiers:
1) Give up lessons far too early
2) Insist of skiing in groups of mixed ability. Which inherently means someone is frequently miserable and being a menace to remaining skiers on piste.

Of course it would be very easy to enforce better skiing practice given how accessible GPS devices are. Setup go slow zones; if you exceed perhaps you lift pass takes a 10minute - 1hr break for you to consider yourself. It would also be informative to give an idea how busy any given slope might be. Not sure is reasonable for someone to tell me how fast to ski a slope but no problems within say 50-75m of a lift line.

I confess once to smashing into a poor gentleman in Bulgaria about 25 years ago when he decided to stop at the bottom of dip that clearly required a schuss to get up the other end. Clearly my fault but certainly one of the problems with skiing is that there is such a mix of ability on any given slope. One man's "rational" decision seemingly idiotic to others.

Carving skis are also not helping as they inherently allow people to ski more dynamically in medium to long turns where without a conscious look uphill you are unsighted (and you aren't going to do that every turn).

No obvious solution but it does sound like you were aware the guy had not seen you and I assume actively chose not to create room. Ask yourself had you been in a car with you family and someone had seemingly not seen you would you have remained in the 'danger zone'; I am guessing you would either accelerate or brake. I say the above as someone who has come back from ACL surgery so have every sympathy but your description of the event does baffle me. You took the moral high ground and ended up with a smashed leg.

That is 8th is Jan at top of Index lift, Chamonix.

If you go to Facebook search Felgere/Brevant and scroll.

It will be interesting what the snow depths are reported at when some of the top lifts open. I know Chamonix is not good at reporting their snow depths but if you check out their FB pages some of the lifts had incredible depths as far back as the 1st week of Jan. If that is 2000m two weeks ago and with two major storms since then I am going to say 8m+ when the top bin of Grand Montets opens (damaged in last storm).

One disadvantage of high resorts, they do get a bit white. Snow must be great though :-).

I think it mainly depends on how disciplined you are with your free skiing. Personally I like to do a few drills every day I ski onpiste so a few hrs works well for me. If not am sure the 3 days of observation are probably of greater value to your skiing.

Makes you realize that a shovel and probe are not much insurance against an avalanche.