Off Piste Perfection Tarentaise

This week I was running the Off Piste Perfection coaching week, a collaboration between www.offpisteskiing.com and Jagged Globe.

Based in Bourg St Maurice this is a mobile week of off piste coaching, and with les Arcs, La Plagne, La Rosiere/La Thuile, St Foy and Val D'Isere/Tignes all within easy reach there is great potential to follow the good snow, weather conditions and pick the best terrain to develop everyone's skiing.

Sunday was forecast snowy and windy, and there are few better places than Les Arcs in those conditions, with lots of open easy tree-skiing to kick the week off:

Stuart checking out some ski heritage at lunchtime in Arcs 1600:

On Monday the forecast was still cloudy and snowy so we headed for the trees of St Foy. Sadly the Marquise and Aiguille chairs didn't open (partly due to a problem with the Gazex avalanche control systems! There is still lots of potential low down though, and we had a very productive day mixing technique and tactics on the lower meadows and tree lines:

On Tuesday we went back to Les Arcs and had a great day in the trees around 1950 and 2000, taking the tactics developed earlier in the week on to steeper angles:

Wednesday saw us heading up to Val D'Isere to make use of the steep terrain for a technically-focussed day which saw everyone making some great changes to their skiing.

The weather forecast was good for Thursday and we headed back up to Les Arcs with a view to finding some untracked snow away from the masses:

Friday was the last day for the team and we chose St Foy as the venue to find some testing snow and slopes to put the week's progress into action:

Thanks to Stuart, Ann and Elaine for their great company through the week, and willingness to make the most of the tricky weather in the first few days!!

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!

Lemmings

Some days on the mountain you just have to shake your head, and yesterday was one of those days...

Les Arcs, risk level High (4), obvious signs of slab releases during avalanche control work and what happens?
A powder frenzy is what happens...

We headed towards the Grand Col chair for a lap or two of the unpisted pistes to warm up. On the way up the chair the slopes to the looker's right of the pistes on the steep shoulder dropping towards Combe de la Commune had 3 obvious slab releases. Half-jokingly I said to my group "I wonder how long it will be until the first tracks go in?", sure enough as we went back up the chair tracks were already appearing, and as always people start nibbling further across and further out...
We put skins on for a short climb up to a minor summit with a safe shoulder line to ski, with a grandstand view of the Grand Col slopes. One minute later, as skiers went ever further right, a skier triggered a slab and was taken for a good 70/80 metre ride, fortunately ending up on the surface, though from a distance appearing to limp and possibly minus a ski:

I called the incident in to the pisteurs just to make them aware, hung up the phone, and not 5 minutes after the first incident a second slab was triggered further over again, by an instructor (clad all in red...) leading his group:

Again, fortunately, nobody was buried.

3 minutes later, as the instructor was walking his group out, a 3rd slab was triggered inbetween the first two. Again the skier was lucky and managed to stay near the side of the slide, but the slab stepped down to a lower layer, and travelled further than the other two, stopping not far above the group from incident 2!:

And in the meantime more skiers appeared over the horizon...

So to paraphrase an acquaintance who knows a thing or two about avalanches - 'It's not f*ckin' rocket science!' (ideally said in an East End accent) - High avalanche risk, steep slopes, obvious recent avalanche activity on similar aspect, angle and elevation - what more information do you need?

In other news there has been great skiing to be had staying on safer (note safER not safe) sub-30º slopes and in tight tree lines:

Some pictures of this week's Off Piste Performance group: