The French Alps 1

I've just had a fantastic week snowboarding in the French Alps, at St. Gervais near Chamonix near the foot of Mt. Blanc. The trip was organised by two close friends from high school who are now in London, Peta and Winnie. Peta, her boyfriend Duncan and I were there for a week, and we were joined later by Winnie and Andrew.

The weather was generally good; a couple of very sunny days which made the views exhilirating, and a few foggy moments of almost no visibility which were less fun. Unlike Thredbo, where pretty much wherever you go you end up back the village, in the Alps if you wander way off piste you remain in the Alps, unless you are lucky enough to hit a village or road. We also had several decent snowfalls so there was virgin powder snow on the mountain in the mornings.

One of my favourite moments was after a couple of days where I had finally got a much better grip on the technique, so I was zooming down a wide piste with knee-high powder on the sides for me to venture into, (almost) fully in control. It was brilliantly sunny, the Alps were dominating the view, and upon hitting the end of the run which was the little village of Les Communales, we could unclip, take a few steps and sit straight down at a table on the veranda of a restaurant and order a few beers and a hot lunch and enjoy the view of Mt. Blanc. It didn't get much better than that.

I had quite a few problems early on with deep powder - going off piste into thigh high powder in my first intermediate snowboarding class was a bigger challenge than I expected. It was exhausting trying to pick yourself up with nothing to push against, and I had to unclip a few times. Eventually I admitted defeat and dropped back down to beginners to get my technique right on some simpler runs. Powder is much more responsive than the icy hills I had practiced on in Sweden.

The town of St. Gervais was also great the scale is hard to imagine after Australian and Swedish ski fields. The bottoms of the runs are often actual, proper towns. The extensive lifts and chairs and tele-freaks (telephereque - the cable cars/gondolas) take you across the backs of mountains onto runs that are based in different towns. Plenty of cheese sausage, patisseries, and boulangeries were present. We were also in the vicinity of the Chartreuse monastery, which makes my favourite drink, and my only disappointment about the place was that the free hot chocolate + Chartreuse was only given out freely 0n one of the days.

As for pics - I'm trying something new, and have put them on Flickr. The link to the set is below:

St. Gervais

For the less technical folk out there: go the website. If you click on 'slideshow'', it will play through all the pics in order, but without the descriptions. If you move the mouse above the pic you will find the slideshow controls (speed, etc) pop up. If you want to click through manually, click on the 1st pic to start, then on the left of the main pic is a small window with 2 thumbnail pics shown. This is for scrolling: the left thumbnail is a preview of the previous pic, and the right one is the next pic. Click on the right thumbnail to keep scrolling through the pics.

Let me how well you think this all works.