cheeseit

After a good 9 or so hours sleep we headed down to breakfast at 7:30, then were out the door by 8:30 and on the first run of the Funival at 8:45. It was a lovely clear ski, the slopes were all freshly groomed, and most importantly we were the first on them. We did a couple of blues we hadn't done yesterday, namely Collet and Club de sports, before heading down the red that turned into the blue Santons, which took us down into the Val d'Isere village.

This took me a very long time and was further proof that my skis needed a waxing and edge sharpening, which admittedly hasn't happened since a week after I bought them in Whistler in 2007, so they're long overdue, and should really have been done in Chamonix last year.

Anyway back to the skiing, we went up the Solaise cable car, which was a mistake compared to the Solaise Express chair lift, slightly further along for three reasons, one the chair lift was quicker based on waiting time, two there was no walking off it along it lots of slippery metal grating and three the chair comes out higher on the Solaise/Madeleine Plateau. So on the third point we had to ski down to the button lift and queue for 10 minutes or so to get on, to get up to anything worthwhile.

Off the button lift, we took the Madeleine express and then took the Red Arcelle run. This was an excellent run, not least because the snow had lightly started to fall again, but also because it was so varied in terrain, from 2-3 inch powder, to hard pack, to soft fresh groomed pack, it was challenging but fun. We took the chair at the bottom back up, and headed over to the other side of the plateau via some nice blues to take the Glacier express chair back up. The run back down was fantastic, visibility could have been better, but the snow was fantastic. We carried on down into Le Laisinant via the red run, which after a long traverse, was quite good fun. We then caught the bus into Val for lunch. After lunch we headed back up to the Bellevarde mountain, and first of all headed over to the borsat express chair, and then took down the borsat run, which being a green lead to more reasons for me needing my skis waxing as there were a couple of flat sections that I couldn't keep any amount of speed up on.

I forget exactly what runs we did in which order, or how many times, but we did get a couple of runs up the Tommeuses chair and then ran down the Blue creux run, which was brilliant, especially on our last run of the day, where the powder was practically up to the top of my boot in places. We also did the red Trifollet run down which was fun until the ice happened and I fell. The last run of the day, also resulted in me quite ashamedly toppling in an epic manner on a green run.

We headed back to the hotel, via the ski shop, to get our skis serviced, then it was afternoon tea, shower, happy hour in the bar, aperatifs, then dinner, although dinner was very tardy, but still good.

Anyway some missed observations, the music in the bar last night was very good, Michael Franti and Spearhead, not a song I recognised, so probably off an album they've released in the last 5 years, still I doubt anyone else knew who it was. Music tonight wasn't so good.

Two, camelbacks may seem a good idea for skiing, but in practice don't work as the water tube and mouth piece freeze very easily, not so bad today, but yesterday it was just useless.

Finally having a longer "Hetfield" beard doesn't work too well in snowy conditions. It freezes up far too easily, or freezes and sticks to your neckwarmer, or if not frozen gets vertically rearranged by your neckwarmer and you end up chewing on the hairs all day long.

Still it's not stopped snowing since about 11 this morning, so there's going to be some lovely powder tomorrow if it stops and we can get up there, and aside from the strong winds forecast it should be a good day for skiing.