Hey! Who stole the snow! We have only been in Italy for a week and look what happened to our Grand Massif while were away.
Apparantly, speaking with Hubert & Marie, every day this last week has been sunny with temperatures in the high teens and early 20's. The snow has been positively pouring off the hill!! It's like someone has turned the dial from Winter directly to Summer! But Rick and Liz have warned. Don't be fooled! In past years there has always been a late dump of snow. I'm not sure whether I believe them though. It has been such a strong winter, I think it's only fair that those poor hedges along our lane get a chance to stand upright and stretch their limbs!
We have a few important tasks to resolve this week. Firstly, according to our car contract with Peugeot we need to arrange for its 10,000km service and secondly we need to figure out how to get home all the stuff we have accumulated over the last 5 months.
But the day dawned sunny and warm and the weather forecast is for rain for the rest of the week. The thought of wasting such glorious weather messing around with car dealerships and DHL couriers held no appeal. Even Graeme reluctantly agreed. I think he was secretly looking forward to a day off the skis. Hard to imagine isn't it?
Procrastination seemed like the best plan, and so we headed out for a ski later in the morning. Unless you like slick, icy groomers, there is absolutely no point being first out on the hill at the moment. The best skiing is between 11 & 2 when the snow pack has softened but not completely deteriorated.
2/ Graeme about to head into the Ger Bowl
The most amazing thing about our visit to Araches, is that we still have loads of runs and areas that we haven't yet skied in our local Grand Massif area. We are at a loss to understand how this could be. What have we been doing all season???
3/ The Ger Bowl
One of the best areas in Flaine is the Ger. With only black runs (navy blue by NZ Standards), the Ger bowl is serviced by an old poma but it's rarely open due to avalanche risk. While we have skied in the valley a couple times as a ski tour, we've never lucked the lift being open.
Time and time again, we wanted to ski the Ger, only to find that it was closed. In fact, we started to get a bit of a complex. Everytime we'd go away, it opened, and by the time we returned - it had closed!!
Finally, today...the Ger was open. And for a magic 3 or so hours we pretty much had the bowl to ourselves. North facing, the snow softened to a lovely spring corn around midday and we enjoyed lapping every possible line until the melt went too far and the snow turned to gloop and it was time to head home.
Tomorrow....we'll definitely get to those admin matters!!
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