Skiing - Vars and Risoul

This week I went on my first ever skiing holiday with Martin, Andrew and 3 of Martin's friends. This proved to be an absolutely amazing week of really good weather and snow. Chris did a really good job of organising the trip on the cheap, which although was to a resort relatively unknown, was really good and had plenty to go at, not only in terms of the runs (for a week) but also the mixed ability snow parks running right from the simple to the insane!

Having skiied on snow twice before - in Aviemore two years ago, and Glen Coe last year - I was quite apprehensive firstly on what I could remember and secondly whether it would be good enough for the larger slopes. I should point out that in these two days I did learn a lot very quickly by mainly falling over and via other errors, after thinking that if I just get the chairlift to the top and just recreate Ski Sunday I'd be fine. Consequently I contemplated getting a lesson with Andrew on his snowboard for one or two days to hone the skills.


We were fortunate enough however to have a hotel on the piste, so getting to the hut to book lessons involved going down an easy green to get there, by which on the way you passed the ski lift. Having watched Martin shoot down to the lift, after getting up from the inevitable fall of putting ski's on for the first time in a while, we duly headed after him. To our surprise neither of us fell over along the way, so we decided to push it down some harder slopes to see how good we were before booking a lesson. This took us down a fair few blues and a couple of reds before the end of the day, where skills were honed to an adequate level where we reckoned lessons weren't needed.


On the second day we went for the harder runs with Dicky also in tow (Chris stayed to help his girlfriend Juile out on some easier runs), going down more reds, including one un-pisted run where Dicky did a headplant and Martin went down the adjacent black. Getting there we ran a blue run, which despite excellent progress on day one, I seemed to forget how to turn so just laid out on the slope to stop!


As the week went on we were all doing fine, my speed and confidence had come on leaps and bounds and I may have got a bit adventurous and tried to head down a really long red Ski Sunday parallel tuck style in a race with Martin, where I took my biggest spill. This involved realising I was going far too fast and heading quickly to a lip at the bottom of the slope where a vast amount of air would result! To try and slow down I tried to do a few small turns, but this went wrong and ended up with one big parallel turn where one of my ski's came off and resulted in about 30m slide on my bum. I came away unhurt but was glad of the helmet (and Martin picking up my ski after reading the inevitable situation).

Most people had comedy falls along the way including on the sledges, with special mention to Andrew for providing some absolutely spectacular displays!

By the end of the week we had done pretty much every run from blue to black, done a fair bit of amazing off piste, eaten too much, got told off in French for accidentally skiing onto a slalom competition training session as a means of a shortcut to a black, and much more. We also messed around in the snow parks a fair bit on the more manageable jumps and grinds (which incidentally provided most of the spectacular falls and tense moments!) Dicky should get a special mention here for doing his one and only grid which was both tense and amazing. Who snowplows onto a grid box, but manages to run it?! Also the French lad 'Judge Dreadlocks' should also get a mention for his brilliant run of the three largest jumps completed courtesy of his backflip, grab trick and 360 spin; whilst not only not wearing a helmet (his dreads would be hidden), not zipping up his coat but also whilst holding a snow saw!!

The night life in the resort is fair to say is poor (there is none) but with the good skiing, company, home cooking and banter along the way the trip was amazing! I'll definitely be going on ski holidays in the future!