J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by AllyG

Lovely photos Tony - it looks great :)

Tony_H wrote:Morning
Pleased to see it was a great week. I have to say you had truly EPIC conditions.....powder to make fresh tracks in as well.....

Good morning Tony, nice to see you safely back from your ski holiday, and I hope you had a great time :-)


We were very lucky with the snow conditions - but perhaps not quite so lucky with the extreme cold!

This is one that Joe Collin took of CatP ski-ing beside the piste on Thursday afternoon, after we'd had a lesson on off-piste skiing in the morning.
It's really supposed to be a video, but we haven't worked out how to post it up on here yet.



In our lesson our ESF instructor was teaching us how to do what he called stem turns off-piste, and I rather think this is the same thing as another instructor has tried to teach me, only he called it the step turn.
Basically, as far as I can see it means ski-ing on only one leg when changing direction and picking up the other leg until the new course is set, when both legs can be used together on the traverse with the skis very close together.

For off-piste skiing I have also been taught jump turns and bounce turns (or whatever the correct expression is). The problem with doing jump turns is that it's totally exhausting!
Using stem turns seemed to work OK, but it's not quite the same technique as the one I used when learning to go from snow-plough to parallel, and I need a lot more practise at it!

As anyone will know who's had a go at ski-ing in deep powder, the problem is how to keep the same weight on both skis, so that one ski doesn't sink and tip you over. You need to move both skis as one. Traversing is relatively easy as long as you keep both skis close together, but turning is not!
So you either need to turn whilst standing on only one leg/ski, or you need to get your weight off both skis so you can turn them together above/through the snow by jumping or 'bouncing'.
What I haven't worked out how to do yet is slow down when traversing in powder without turning uphill. From what the instructor said it sounds like it involves pushing down - ? another case for bouncing?

Yes Icy - I know how they all got their names :mrgreen:

This is one of Felthorpe's photos of Daved, Sinbad14, and Far Queue in La Folie Douce :)

Apres dinner in the chalet. Tiger7 is far left :)

ATOO wrote:6 Sleeps to go and I haven't recovered from my last one yet and now I've gained a chest infection that's making it hard to even walk upstairs without getting out of breath ,hey ho hopefully I'll meet a nice Swedish woman to look after me :-)

Oh no! Have you been to the doctor's to see if they can do anything for you? I hope you've fully recovered before you go!

This is Sinbad14's photo of the chef cooking an enormous paella for supper, with crayfish on the top!



The chef did his best to feed, and amuse us :)

For pudding one day he made profiteroles and then said we had no cutlery to eat them with because the dishwasher had broken down :shock:

But then he confessed that actually it was a set-up :-)

It was really going to be a competition between the 2 dinner tables. Each table had to choose a champion and then there was a competition to see which champion could eat the most profiteroles without using their hands!

Old Andy nominated CatP on our table (having previously heard of some of her gastronomic exploits) and the other table nominated Ade's friend Spence.

CatP is a very smart lady and before the race started she organized her profiteroles into a mountain shaped pile - easy to get at with her mouth whilst not using her hands.

Anyway - Catp won by miles - Spence ate as many as he could until he totally failed :lol:

I'm not sure how many CatP ate in the end - because she carried on eating them after the contest had finished - but I'm sure it was way more than 20!

CatP says her photos of the Eye of the Needle (the Aiguille Percee) with her actually sitting in the hole in the rock, didn't come out very well so I asked Bedrock Barney if I could 'borrow' his photo of it, from his holiday in Val d'Isere. The 'Eye' is in the lower left section.

Cat and I skied along the edge of the rock, on an itinerary route, right up to the Eye on the last Sunday, and Cat took her skis off and climbed into the hole in the rock.

I stayed where I was, and the slope was so steep that when I tried to sit down for a rest it was more like leaning on a wall than sitting down :shock:



This is one of CatP's photos of the Aiguille Percee taken from the far side - on our way home. I nick-named it 'The Blue Plate' because the first time I saw it last April I thought momentarily it was a blue plate stuck on the rock, until I realized that was totally ridiculous and impossible :oops:
The chairlift going up is the Aiguille Percee lift.