Chamonix Off Piste Coaching

Last week I was based in Chamonix, running 5 days of off piste coaching for Tim, John and Phil. With snow very thin on the ground (or granite) in Chamonix we played the 'lateral thinking' cards and managed to find some reasonable snow to ski on every day with a short drive...

The guys all made great progress throughout the week, with some big changes put in place:

Bonus bumper powder day on the Friday to reward the gang for their perseverance!

Overall conditions remain thin, despite the big fall of snow over the weekend we are effectively now running on a mid-December style snowpack - lots more needed to bring us back towards normal - areas with grass or glacier underneath will still be a good bet until the next snowfall!

The Italian Job

With another rare day off, inconclusive conditions for bigger objectives and a hunger for good coffee and pizza meant a day in La Rosière and La Thuile with Chipie.
Not only did the coffee and pizza live up to expectations, the snow was OK too...:

Off Piste Perfection coaching course 2015

An interesting week this week with the Off Piste Perfection course (run in collaboration with Jagged Globe) in the Tarentaise. Our valley base in Bourg St Maurice gave us maximum flexibility to follow the weather and good snow. Despite a high level of avalanche risk earlier in the week we were able to ski great (and safer) snow off piste all week long with a bit of careful route choice.

The camera stayed in the bag mostly as temperatures were very cold (though there are some shots from our days in Les Arcs here), but here are a few shots from our last day in La Rosière/La Thuile. A bit windy, but still some good snow to be found (not to mention great food and coffee over in Italy :-) ) and a ski all the way down to the lower roundabout at Séez in great snow to cap it all off.
Thanks to Tanya, Ben, Jack, Ruan, Chas and Andrew for a great week!