Week Three keep in control at all times

This week our instructor is Kim, a French Canadian lady who seems to like being in the trees alot.
So trees figured alot in the week as we learnt the best ways to travel through them, taking the line below a tree and committing to the turn so your body doesn't get caught up in the branches. The key piece of advice for trees is don't look at them. if you look at them you will ski into them, better to look at the gaps and plan a couple of turns ahead (if you can see for all the trees!)

On the technical side we worked on our turns and I particularly worked on remembering to use my polls and have my arms out in front of me. The correct pose is something like what you would be in if you were getting ready to jump off a low table. With bends at the knees and ankles, weight on the balls of your feet. With your stomach held tight and your arms out in front of you. They call it an athletic stance. We also continued to increase the hardness of the steeps we journeyed into.

The weather this week gave us a huge amount of snow and with the change in conditions we got chance to learn about powder or Pow! skiing. The two main things to think about in pow is to still be centrally balanced on the skis, not to lean back and to keep the skis a bit closer together as they cut through the snow. The general techniques on skiing don't change, be it in powder, or on steeps or moguls or on groomers. Getting the weight on the down hill ski, pivoting, edging and planting the polls are all the same. Powder is great fun and Kim took us to some great bits of the resort to experience it.

On Friday I had a day out with Ed the snowboarder across to Symphony bowl to play in all the trees and the new pow. Symphony had been closed for the past couple of days due to the Avalanche risks and so it hadn't been over skied. We had a great couple of hours messing about in Staccato grove.

The weekend which was still in mostly white out conditions was the Avalanche course. This is separate from the Ski instructing system and focuses on skills which would be useful in more back country situations that are not ski patrolled. We covered the types of Avalanches and how to spot the conditions that cause them. There was some interesting science into the way the snow pack forms and ways they forecast what the conditions will be like. We also learnt how to use radio transponders, probes and snow shovels so we can self rescue in the event of an avalanche. This was quite fun as we pretended to find and rescue buried people.