Heard The One About The Snowboarder & The T-Bar?

Wednesday morning started in much the same vain as previous days, clear sunny skies and up the Pied Moutet, but it was becoming very obvious that the snow was disappearing rapidly from the lower slopes. Still, there is plenty of snow and good skiing to be had higher up, and after a few runs to warm up we head off for the snow park on the glacier.

We spend a bit of time watching some of the young guns attempt various jumps and aerials with varying degrees of success, and we smirk quietly to ourselves every time someone on a snowboard wipes out, before we make our own cautious efforts. We all survived unscathed the first time, but there was not a lot of air under our skis, so we head up again for another go. This time Gary is a bit more ambitious and not quite so lucky. I watch him successfully take off and disappear over the first jump, then he takes off with a bit more speed and air over the second and disappears, but this time he does not reappear for the third jump, instead after a bit of a pause, he is seen walking off to the side of the piste carrying his skis, whoops! Fortunately there is no damage done.

After one more attempt, with more success for all of us this time we decide it is time to move on, but not before we witness what is probably the most bizarre wipe out of the week. Some how Andy Ogbourne manages to manoeuvre his snowboard in such a way that he collides with the support pylon whilst going up on the T-bar! This is all highly amusing to all of us, except Andy of course, but I think he has got over it now. Still, it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been on skis!!

After negotiating the steep and in places quite icy Super Diable black run we settled for lunch at the restaurant near the bottom of the run, most of us that is. Karen managed to miss the track that ran off to the restaurant and ended up skiing all the way to the bottom, so she had to go back up the chair lift and ski the run again. No matter, she didn’t miss out much as service was not particularly swift at the restaurant today.

The afternoon was spent cruising around on the blues and reds in the Toura and La Fee areas before we headed back to the hotel. Today we took the easy option and made our way back to the resort on the Diable gondola.

Wednesday evening was a fairly quiet affair, evening meal was the usual salad buffet, pasta and main course consisting of over cooked croquet potatoes and some indeterminate meat, however it had been noticed that there was now only 1 horse in the field where there had been 2 at the start of the week! Surely just a coincidence maybe, or maybe not?

Following on from the meal, most people adjourned to the bar for a quiz night, whereas some of us thought this would be far to taxing and decided we would rather just kill off a few more brain cells rather than exercise them, and headed off for the polar bear bar.

After just a few drinks we called it a night as the plan was to ski down to La Grave the following morning and this would involve an earlier start than previous days in an attempt to get the first lifts. So it was off to bed for an earlyish night, we must be getting old!