 Poster: A snowHead
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Quick question, are you flying solo and already booked?
The guy that runs snowheads organises trips. There is one on 16th April to val thorens unfortunately it is fully booked but there is spaces come up time to time. The tuition lessons are second to none that you can sign up to. Certainly worth a look.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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| WASHOUT wrote: |
Quick question, are you flying solo and already booked?
The guy that runs snowheads organises trips. There is one on 16th April to val thorens unfortunately it is fully booked but there is spaces come up time to time. The tuition lessons are second to none that you can sign up to. Certainly worth a look. |
Ah, that does indeed look full, and also perhaps unfortunately I don't tend to do well in large groups, but thanks for letting me know!
Edit: I just sent a bunch of emails to all mentioned schools asking for advice. Let's see what they say...
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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No one has mentioned ESF I don’t think. They seem to be massively unpopular on here but I’ve only had good experiences with them. My husband had some private lessons with them a few years ago in Tignes and really rated his instructor.
Personally, in your situation, I would book group lessons. For me it would be more fun as you’ll have lunch together, you’d also have people to ski with in the afternoon to practice what you’ve learned and probably drinks after. They will assess you on the first day and move you if you’ve booked the wrong level. Private lessons every day is a lot of time to spend with one person and quite an unusual way of doing it.
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I thought I'd write a quick report given that the trip's now past. It was a blast! And also challenging.
Decided to go with private lessons on most days. While I did feel the social aspect a bit, being able to gear the lessons towards exactly what I wanted was pretty fantastic. Fred, the instructor with Ultimate, was onboard with me spending more time than usual on technique. Lots of runs on e.g. the Rosset green-ish blue to work on various drills and aspects of technique, interspersed with skiing down runs like Verte (whoever decided to label that a green was just evil...) or some of the blue runs around the Chaudannes and Palafour chairlifts.
I came into this trip having the perhaps naive notion that slope steepness would be one of the main "enemy", or the main reason why I'd consider a slope challenging or not. After the trip I'm much less fazed by steepness, and am now quite happy letting my body weight get forward to get control.
I now have a new enemy though, and that's the slush. God that was awful, and although the instructor said that it didn't look like I was struggling that much, in my mind every turn involved a large amount of effort to keep stable when the pistes got slushy. Petit Col was super comfortable in better snow conditions, then next day I spent more time on my ass than upright when it was slushy (that was one of the non-lesson days, and later in the day than the original run). I'll probably avoid booking further spring ski holidays for a while...
Quite a few months until next season (though I'm trying to convince a few friends back home in South America to pick up skiing), but now I need to reflect on what I'd look for for my next trip in terms of instruction. I really liked the highly personalized session plan; I'm afraid in a group setting we'd have done more mountains and fewer drills, but I feel like doing a lot of drill work has really helped me. "More banana shape" is probably a phrase that'll echo in my mind for a while  . OTOH it would also be fantastic to have a bit more of a social experience, but these two things seem a bit at odds with each other. I'll have to give this a think.
All in all great fun and really looking forward to my next ski trip, though I have no plans of where/when it'll be, as I haven't found a group of people to ski with yet. We'll see.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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| badbadjokes wrote: |
>
34% gradient sections within the blues at a certain resort... |
which resort is that?
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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| Mother hucker wrote: |
| badbadjokes wrote: |
>
34% gradient sections within the blues at a certain resort... |
which resort is that? |
Andermatt, but I now realize Tignes is roughly the same, so maybe it's not that much of an issue. Though then again I've seen debates here in the forum about Tignes perhaps being too optimistic with their run coloring too. I probably need way more experience in different resorts to form a proper opinion.
The real issue with Andermatt is that there's nothing in between, it's either the magic carpet or something like a intermediary Tignes blue, so progression is hard.
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