|
Over the Christmas period between the 24th and the 28th of December 2002, I decided to join a bunch of mates in Switzerland for a bit of Snowboarding at a little village called Les Diablerets.
I left London after a half-day at work and headed out on a direct flight to Geneva. The flight was very quiet and I arrived safely, despite sitting next to a woman from Nigeria that had a mouth on her that would put a Harley Davidson to shame. Naturally, any sleep I had planned on getting to prepare for the inevitable boozer that night was discarded.
From Geneva, I caught the train to a small town at the base of the mountains called Aigle where I had to change and catch the snow train for about 50 minutes up into Les Diablerets. We were met at the station by all the boys and headed back to the chalet to settle in and have dinner. That night was quite a boozer and I woke up the next morning feeling way below par. Fortunately, the prospect of snowboarding all day was an uplifting thought and gave me the strength to begin the morning quite early.
|
| This is the view from our balcony and shows a bit of the town |
The mountain that we did the majority of our skiing on was called Glacier 3000 and was precisely that. At 3128 metres above sea level, it was really high and quite cold, so we had good snow there pretty much all the time. The only restricting factor was the weather, which turned out to be a little off key on the second day.
|
| This is me at the summit with a drop of about 2000 metres behind me. |
There was a long journey up to the top of the piste with everybody having to take two separate gondolas, but well worth it in the long run. The Glacier itself was a lot like a glacier surprisingly. Very steep at the sides and then undulating mellow slopes at the top which provided a lot of good fun for beginners and intermediates alike. Unfortunately the snowline was still too high to get most of the more difficult slopes open, but that suited me fine as I was trying to get the hang of snowboarding.
|
| This is a view of the Glacier from off piste |
On Christmas day, we decided to have dinner in a restaurant in town. Everyone went for the French cuisine, considering we were in the French area. Switzerland is about 17% French and tends to be concentrated in the South West around Geneva. The meal consisted of Fondues and Raclette as can be seen in the picture.
|
| The packed dinner tabel at christmas |
On the second day, we decided that the weather looked too ominous at the top of the glacier, so we would go through to Gstad on the train and snowboard there for the day as it was lower, being at 2000 metres, so better visibility, despite the snow not being so good. As it turned out, it was the right decision as the glacier was not ski able due to bad visibility. We got snow there and it was quite heavy on top of the glacier, so the following and last day of skiing looked promising...and was.
|
| View from the train just ouside Gstad |
The wind was really howling on the final day on the slopes, but once we fought our way through it, and got onto the top of the glacier, it calmed down and the sun came out. We had a fantastic day of carving up the slopes and even did an hour or so of off-piste which was fantastic. As one sits down and looks around, all that can be seen is pathways through the slopes caused by yourself and other boarders...beautiful and very surreal.
|
| Nate off-piste getting "some air" |
|
