BASI Ski Instructor training: Day 4

Today we mostly worked on our piste performance along with some slightly steeper off piste stuff in the afternoon from the new detatchable quad which opened today.

The picture below of a Condor circling on the thermals above the top of the new lift was taken by Chris.

We started the day, under the triple chair, with a slightly more focused warm up than usual. We were split into pairs and told to analyse each other’s performance in both short turns and high speed carved turns; the person being analysed decided which of the things that they were working on they’d like feedback on and the person doing the analysis watched them perform and then gave feedback. This seemed to work quite well. Neil and I did two runs and things definitely felt better for me after getting, and acting on, the feedback from the first run. I was working on staying more centered all the time in my short turns and getting an appropriate amount of hip angulation going on in my carved turns. Interestingly when I managed to stay forward the whole time through my carved turns the hip angulation just happened; normally I let my hip drop slightly back and it seems that this then inhibits the angulation…

Next we did a bit of a warm up and then had a discussion about ski design and the ways that the various directions of flex available from the ski enabled it to perform in different ways.

Next we started a “round robin” under the triple chair. Julian in one fixed spot and the rest of us lapping around doing short turns on the upper slope and carved turns on the flatter section. I continued to work on the issues that I’d been working on with Neil until Julian told me to switch to doing shorter, checkier short turns and to initiate the new carved turn more powerfully by using a very early start to the extension of the new outside leg. Both worked well.

After several laps on the chair the triple chair was getting quite busy so we decided to head down to the double chair that starts a little lower down. We did a 3 x 3 synchro ski all the way down, trying to keep in synch throughout the change in pitch and, inadvertently, through the lower bump section (we were doing pretty well up to this point but since only one of the lines of three was in the bumps it became somewhat harder to keep in synch with the leader who wasn’t in the bumps!). For the last section of bumps down to the lift we did a very close (ski within 1m of each other) follow my leader through the bumps with Julian at the lead; we did quite well…

We took the lift up and got caught half way up by a power cut that stopped all the lifts on the mountain. I realised what had happened without even seeing the other lifts stop as when ours stopped the mountain became silent… Several of the lifts, ours included, switched to diesel power and slowly cranked the chairs to the top; others had to sit and wait until the problem was fixed.

Once we were skiing again we did a ‘carving snake’, Julian at the front and the rest of us trying to carve tracks that remained within the tracks that he’d set. This meant that we all had to work quite hard to vary the radius of the arcs that we were carving as all our skis had quite different natural turn shapes. We followed the path down to the new runs that had been put in for the new lift and then headed down to the two drag lifts. Some of us had lunch at the restaurant at the base of the long drag (that’ll be a steak sandwich and chips for me!) and some went to Viento Cero as usual.

After lunch we did some work on steeper terrain next to the long drag. We built a zip line in the soft snow (lots of aggressive, short turns tend to do that) and then tried to ski it (even though I started the turns I couldn’t keep inside the line once it had been cut quite deep.). On the lower section we tried to do the same for a sequence of long carved turns but the snow was too choppy for us to be able to easily see and follow the line of the people who had gone before. We lapped a few times on the long drag doing this…

After a while we skied down to the base of the new lift and took a ride to the top; we managed to make it all the way there without it stopping (it’s still having some teething troubles) and the views were amazing. The new lift gives access to a huge bowl and the tops of the wide chutes that you can traverse across to from the long drag. Lots of stuff that was only skiable with a hike from the top of the drag is now easy to get to. They’ve put in several new pisted runs but I think the best stuff available from this lift is going to be the off piste stuff. We skied down under the lift in the off piste and it was uniformly heavy and wind blown in places; still it was fun and reasonably steep.

Once we got down to the flatter section we did some more carving drills; this time working on laying the skis over so that we could touch the snow with the inside hand during the turn; this was a lot of fun. We then skied down to the shorter drag via a follow my leader off piste route and did some more drills on the blue next to the drag. Mostly upper body separation stuff; holding our poles out with our straps hanging down and doing short turns (the straps shouldn’t swing), balancing our poles on the backs of our hands and rating how much each other’s butts swung as we turned (no movement is good).

Finally we skied down to the top of the sextuple where some of us downloaded and others opted to ski down. Since I’d had my skis serviced last night and since yesterday’s ski down ended in mud and rocks and a walk I decided to ride the chair.

Our lecture covered teaching principles and was pretty interesting.

Today was another good day, it was hard work but fun and we got quite a lot of skiing in. The plan for tomorrow is more of the same with the added twist that all the groups will be skiing together again.