Embrace The Chaos

Hi everyone and welcome back to the latest post from your favourite blogging Méribel ski instructor. There's been a two week gap since my previous post, and so much has happened here in Méribel. Just before the British school holidays (on the second of four weeks for the French holidays), we had a really nice dump of fresh snow. What a great set up for the half-term week. Plus, on the first day of half-term, the sun came out to cheer us up.

I skied with Keith and Laura on that day, and tried to drop the hint that we should soak up this glorious weather and snow conditions and make the most of it, because I had seen the forecast for the rest of the week. To say it was looking very stormy was the understatement of the year. The next morning, the mountain was a very different place to be in.

For the rest of the week heavy snowfall was the theme, with high winds at altitude. This meant that the top half of the mountain was closed to us skiers because of the wind, and also a very high avalanche risk indeed. The avalanche risk has a rating out of five, and it was at the maximum of five out of five for several days, which is a very rare occurrence. Any heavy snowfall is always welcome in my book, but it can have negatives, and chaos can prevail which is exactly what happened.

When the higher ski lifts are closed, this means that obviously all of the skiers stay on the bottom half of the mountain. This can create some ski lift queues in normal weeks outside of the school holidays. When this situation happens during the busy holiday period, it's chaos, with massive lift queues. Most of the time I was able to use that precious ski school priority line. I give it a different name but won't share it with you today for fear of being knee-capped. If you ski with me, you may have heard me use this secret description.

We often get weather like this during a ski season, but it's usually just the odd day or two to get through and be patient with. But half-term week was five days in a row of such chaos, which really needed to be embraced. What else could we do? With just a small percentage of pistes being open, being inventive was occasionally tricky. However for a couple of days, the Méribel Stade (the Olympic and World Championship race piste) was open to the public. It was great being able to take Team Harrington/Barber down the Stade. It was strange seeing piste markers lined up down the Stade, which wouldn't normally be there. If I have one issue though, the pisteurs had planted blue piste markers. There's no way this would be graded as a blue, more like a red realistically. But hey, we took this little victory.

For what was a tough week being on the mountain sometimes, we did have some cracking skiing, with the new snow feeling fresh and velvety. Plus, some of the scenes in front of us were beautiful, with the amount of snow accumulating on the trees and the roofs of buildings everywhere.

It was a fun week, and one to remember in years to come. This last week has been the complete opposite with blue sky and sunshine every day, in fact it has felt very spring like with some days being over 10 degrees above the seasonal average! I've skied with quite a mixture of people; a seven year old girl (beginner) from Bucharest in Romania, a couple from Cape Town in South Africa, a lady from Estonia (who is an orchestra conductor), a financial advisor from Leicestershire, and finally a cardiac anesthesiologist from Glasgow. Starting tomorrow is the fourth and final French school holiday, and I wonder who I will ski with this week. Right, that'll do for now. I'll end with my usual credo, Live With Passion. Martin.