Scrapes, stacks and spills

Now that I am back in the chalet, safe and unmaimed having completed my final day of skiing, it's time to share a couple of crash stories from the last week.


After my slightly wobbly first day, the ski legs came back and the speed started to build. On days two and three I felt completely back to normal, cruising around the slopes with no falling over or anything. It was all going so well. 


We headed over to the Swiss side of the resort on Thursday, and were trying to navigate our way to a place called Morgins. This turned out to be exceedingly difficult as every route choice we made turned out to be the wrong one and we found ourselves being everywhere we did not want to be. Eventually, after fighting through slush, mud and patches of ice we were on the right run. This brilliant bit of red would lead into a lovely, long winding blue run through the trees and into the holy grail of Morgins.


The red run started fantastically, weaving up and down and off camber and all that other good stuff. Then we got to a steep section with a left bend at the bottom. AJ whizzed off like a pro and I followed, powering down through the turns. I was feeling super confident and highly skilled when suddenly, on the last left turn before the corner, I hit a patch of solid ice and went careering off the edge of the run. Mere moments later, after absolutely crapping myself, I found myself (thankfully) intricately tangled in a mesh of plastic barrier. One ski was halfway through whilst the other was wedged in the snow, forcing my leg to contort at quite an interesting angle. Both poles, still attached to my wrists, were lost in the netting and incredibly, my helmet had also managed to affix itself.


Fortunately, Jane had been right behind me and seen me fly off the edge. I tried to get her to take a photo but she was very sensible and could see that the not-for-weight-bearing plastic net and poles were straining to their limit and that it was possibly marginally more important to untangle me before it all gave way.

Laughing in the face of solid ice

After just about recovering from this shock to the system, we headed down onto the aforementioned 'lovely, long, winding blue' only to find that instead of a ski run it was in fact about 10kms of solid, sheet ice. It was the most stressful 10kms of my life as I concentrated on digging in my edges as hard as I could on the ice whilst staying away from the big drop on the left hand side. We made it to Morgins, which was not even the tiniest bit worth it, so we caught the first lift out and vowed never to come back!


The next day I managed something quite spectacular. I managed to completely miss the fact that the piste we were on went around to the right hand side. AJ was once again in front and almost made the same mistake but he skidded to a halt as he realised. Whilst he was stood there he saw me ski straight past him at a tremendous speed and actually fly through the air off the edge, land in a heap and then slide uncontrollably down the slope, coming to a stop just before I hit a small building. Thank God for helmets. He came straight down to check if I was alright, and apart from being a bit battered and winded, I was. Then he proceeded to wet himself.


So, two fairly impressive spills, two more lives lost. Moral of the story: ALWAYS wear a helmet, and remember to turn around corners.