Season Diary - Day 2
Updated: Dec 19, 2024
Wednesday December 4, 2024 - My Birthday!
Today was more of the same as yesterday, albeit in reverse – a morning’s ski followed by an afternoon in the classroom.
We almost immediately headed off piste, tucking under the Tommeuses chair to score some lines on Familial, one of the best easy-access into to off piste routes in Tignes and Val d’Isere. It is important to be here early, as it regularly tracks out after fresh snowfall, but there is plenty to go around.
At the bottom, you can cut hard left to get back to the base of Tommeuses chair, and head back up to the plateau above Tignes le Lac that serves as the fulcrum for much of the area. But you can keep going, too, into a couple of different off-piste runs that are a serious step change from what you’ve just done.
You can keep going down through the trees into the La Dialle sector of Val d’Isere, or you can duck really off the beaten track and into Vallee Perdue, which translates as the “hidden valley”. This is a twisty-turny rock strewn roller coaster through the valley that is only for the brave of heart. It is possible to twist and turn your way through at slow speed, but it often feels more effort than it is worth, especially sliding down on your arse over some of the really awkward bits!
This was a day dominated by sharks. Sharks is a skiers’ term for rocks, so-called because they stick up just above the surface of the snow like a shark’s fin. In North America, they may be referred to as cookies, as they resemble the chocolate chips on the surface of a delicious cookie!
The snow this year has been a little lacklustre, to say the least. But it is starting to move in, with some good stuff predicted this weekend to really give things a boost. Until then, it is waiting for the inevitable agonising scrape of a rock against the bottom of your ski.
And scrape it did. I’m not sure where, or when, but I caught a shark with quite some vigour and have paid the consequences, dearly. I don’t remember hitting anything too severely, but where I did hit it was right under the boot of the ski – right where the bulk of my weight would have been at the time.
Even more unfortunately, but I’ve had a scrape there before, which I was able to repair with a bit of epoxy resin and p-tex. The rock managed to catch the edge of the p-tex and tear it off – fine, this has happened with all my p-tex repairs to date (almost), so not the end of the world. But not only did it get under that p-tex, it kept going, ripping a sizeable chunk about an inch long right next to the edge.
So how did I spend my afternoon? At après dancing on the tables? No siree. Instead, I was head down in the boot room, singeing my fingers on a lighter to melt p-tex in to the gaping wound in my skis.
Ski repair is really easy to do yourself, by the way. It is quite fiddly, with a few steps, but each step is really really simple and can save you quite a bit of money in terms of servicing and repairs. The best bit is everything is available to learn via YouTube videos and ski forums online, and so much of what you are sold by ski shops is fairly redundant. You don’t even need a huge amount of specialist equipment, either – instead of using a ski wax iron to melt the wax onto your skis, you can use a domestic iron turned up fairly high.
A pro-tip, however; don’t then use that same iron to iron your shirts … you can’t guarantee you’ll get all the wax out and can ruin some nice clobber!
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