Season Diary - Day 20
Monday 10 March 2025 – Flaine, France
An 11th-hour call-up off the bench saw me rapidly changing flights, booking and re-booking transfers, and carefully negotiating with the Better Half to allow me to spend an extra week away this March …
Despite my best intentions, I was off to Rep for the Ski Club of Great Britain. Regular readers of this column will be familiar with my two-week stint in Tignes in December, where I spent 11 days skiing every nook and cranny, getting my technique torn to shreds and rebuilt again, and generally learning how to be an amazing Rep for the Ski Club.
I hadn’t really ever intended to use those skills this season; my place on the course was confirmed late and as a result, I had filled my winter with other trips before I could squeeze in a Rep slot.
But with another Rep dropping out short notice, work flew me in (almost literally) in to Flaine to Rep for this week.
Flaine is a reasonably sized resort located about an hour from Geneva. It sits in a sub-chain of the French Alps called the Grand Massif that is, officially, the snowiest corner of the Alps. Without foothills to the west and brushing nervously up against Mont Blanc – separated by the Chamonix Valley – it scores snow from all angles and directions. It is, therefore, a great place to ski off piste but also massively underrated. A child of the 1960s boom in French purpose-built ski resorts, it looks like it should be the main plot driver of a contemporary feature film on architecture …
But what it lacks in looks, it makes up for in skiing. We woke up this morning to about an inch of fresh snow on the ground. This was by no means enough to make up for the fortnight of sun and dry weather, but it was a useful start. To kick off the morning, we headed straight up the north-facing main bowl of Flaine where the snow was in seriously good nick.
Most of Flaine is fast, rolling blues and reds. Plenty of time and space to open up the gas and bring the edges into play. We skied these a-plenty this morning, skipping between pistes and up lifts, occasionally darting off the side to see if snow had begun to soften up yet; spoiler alert, it hadn’t.
But what of the repping? What of putting all these hard earned skills to good use?
Well …
With no Rep in resort last week, a few of the regulars had come together and shared a ski. Many of these knew the resort very well, being seasonnaires here or spending so much time here they might as well be, Brexit days notwithstanding.
As a result, I hadn’t gotten a word in before they were beckoning me off towards the lifts! We skied together all day, and they were superb in sharing their knowledge of the resort and the best places to go.
The Rep has two roles. The first is knowing the resort like the back of their hand, knowing where the good snow always is, at what elevation the corduroy turns to slush, and when to avoid the crowded home run at the end of the day. It’s always difficult to be parachuted into unknown resorts, so the helping hand was a huge boost to help overcome this hurdle and become a “proper” Rep.
And secondly, the Rep is there to bring everyone together to create and share an amazing time. Bringing everyone together is not negotiable, but part of being a Rep rather than a guide or leader is to share the responsibility of having a good time. This was that to a T.
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