Explore europe in a campervan

The day started off with the intention of popping over to Switzerland to check out the snow-kiting spot again. We are yet to see anyone snow-kiting in the Portes Du Soleil area, even though we found a site on the internet that claims to teach snow-kiting near Les Crosets. I didn’t get very far though, as soon as I got up to the top of Avoriaz the visibility was very poor so decided to leave that trip for another day.

Last night it rained in Morzine and Avoriaz. The temperature still hasn’t dropped below 4º. Once the snow gets all wet it gets slushy and runs very slow. From the weather forecast we looked at today it looks like we may have more of this to come!

Lucy was going to do her favourite run from above the Chapelle snowpark down past the Trashers beginners park and down a relaxed blue piste. I decided to go ahead and blast down through Avoriaz and meet Lucy later once I had checked out the Chapelle snowpark. It wasn’t much fun! The snowpark was very slushy, slow and full of people having ski/board lessons. The Trashers beginner park was busy and the relaxed blue piste was so slow that I nearly had to walk!

I then decided to try the Stash which is a natural terrain park in amongst the trees. All was well until I fell off the end of a tree trunk rail onto what looked like tree roots sticking out of the snow. I had an audience of about 10 learner snowboarders so quickly got up and carried on like nothing happened. Until I got round the corner where I checked my injuries! To my amazement I didn’t even have a blemish, I was sure I would have at least a big graze, since one of the tree roots scraped right down my forearm.

I caught up with Lucy to tell her I was heading home, as it wasn’t much fun for me today. When I finally caught up with her we decided to check out higher up the mountain for some steeper runs where there hadn’t been any rain. Visibility up there was very bad so that wasn’t much fun either. Then towards the bottom of the run Lucy caught the front edge of her snowboard in the snow and went down face first, hitting the snow with her cheek! There is a competition on now to see who gets the best bruise. You’ll be glad to hear no one has any serious injuries.

We did get to see the pipe monster in action today, recreating the half-pipe! And no the pipe monster isn’t some mythical creature. It’s a piste basher that has an attachment on it to shape the walls of a half-pipe. A picture of it can be seen in the gallery here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.