J2Ski Holiday 2014

This is what happens if you ski over the powdery bumps too fast - Daved's son on the red piste 10 going down from the Folgarida ski area to the Madonna di Campiglio area (Photo CatP).

Actually, he learned to ski really fast :)
He was only a total beginner when he came with us last year, and midway through the week in Folgarida he managed to ski down the black piste (1) into Folgarida village!

I am still amazed looking at the photos at the quality of the snow. And also how much Wickers persists in complaining despite a week away in such awesome conditions. But you still had to take a minibus to the lifts, and the huge queue for the lift in the picture........terrible. Ally, you really need to research your choices better for next time.

Tony - you're quite right - the snow was fantastic all week! :)
It was that perfect, squeaky, sort of snow :)
We never saw any kind of slush!

And you know perfectly well that the queue in that photo was the longest one we found all week - that's why we took a photo of it! Mostly we just went straight onto the lifts :)

I had a great holiday and we were amazingly lucky with all that snow :) :) :)

The most exciting ski-ing I had all week was during the afternoon of the last day of the group holiday, the Saturday.

We'd all arranged to meet up at the Umbrella Bar by the Groste gondola at 12-30 (where we are in that group photograph). Daved and CatP were rather late for this, but some of the others knew it was because they were ski-ing down a difficult black run somewhere. Anyway, when they turned up they'd been down the black 70 piste, that comes down from Monte Spinale. And we'd been planning on going down it that afternoon - in fact we'd thought about doing it earlier in the week and we had a look at it but no-one else seemed to have been down it and Daved told us later that he'd had it on good authority from 2 ski instructors that it was closed. We knew it was a very difficult unpisted run, and Daved said it had a 70 degree slope and he wasn't doing it again! But CatP was up for it, so after the group had finished with the photographs, eating, and throwing snowballs at each other (!) 6 of us headed off for this run.

I didn't know it at the time (fortunately perhaps) but Sinbad14 was filming us with his GoPro. Afterwards he downloaded it onto my memory stick, but I can't post up the whole video on here because it's 11 minutes long and with the internet speed in the village here it would take 20 hours to get it up on YouTube! So I've taken a series of 'Stills' off it.

I thought I'd begin by showing you what the end of this piste is like. The GoPro had run out before we got there, but luckily CatP has this lovely photo of her and Daved on it. The funny thing about it, is that by the time I got there I wasn't at all worried about that slope and I didn't even NOTICE how STEEP it was!!!

Here's the sign at the top of the piste
(story to be continued later...)

Here are the 6 of us setting out down the hardest piste in the ski area - the Spinale Direttissima, piste number 70.

We have - Sinbad14 (the camera man), Davidsa2 (all in black), CatP (bright yellow jacket), Billip1 (white helmet), Simon (black jacket with white sections), and me (red jacket and white helmet).

The first casualty of this piste - Billip1 does a little wobble and has a quick sit down, but is up so fast I didn't even know about it until I watched the video afterwards! I was concentrating on ski-ing very slowly and carefully and following the black piste markers down the left hand side.



Second casualty of the piste - CatP also has a little sit down, but finds it very difficult to get up because she's fallen over on a comparatively flat bit and the camera man helps her up (I have this problem as well if I fall over on the flat).

I don't know why they fell over on this section of the piste - I suppose it must have either been the powdery lumps or the fact that the visibility wasn't that great. I think it must have been low cloud because it cleared as we went down.

Billip1 and CatP back up and proceeding down the piste as planned ...



Everything was fine until I got to here - where the piste divided, and I didn't know which way to go ...
So I waited for Simon and then the others to come up behind me so we could decide which way to go. I couldn't see any piste markers to my left or right, although I'd been following them down the left hand side. As far as I was concerned they'd simply vanished! And there were very few tracks of people who'd gone before us, but there seemed to be an equal number going straight on and going right. And there was some netting on the right, but it had been rolled up as though the way had been opened up.

In the end we decided to go right ...