boarderzone.com / Southern Hemisphere Season Starts in Style

Shaydars Euro Trash Files- were back in Tignes

Kiwis going

off in Europe

"After the initial fear of having to trust completely foreign equipment the rush was amazing climbing a vertical wall of ice.!.."

It's been a very fun and eventful few weeks since we got back from Alpe D'Huez. I've broken one board on a rock and had the brand new replacement Burton Balance stolen after only 10 days riding on it. THIEVES ARE SCUM!! A few friends from home have come to visit and we've gotten out of Tignes to sample a few different activities around the area.

Tom, who worked in the park at Cardrona last winter, came to visit for a couple weeks and we scored some great days together. He's a full cert instructor so helped heaps with my riding and led me to some sick fresh lines after hikes that turned into scary climbs. The results were definitely worth the effort though as we scored fresh tracks down 500m vertical of tight chutes days after it snowed!

After the adrenaline of impromptu climbing for lines we decided to do the real thing so we hired a guide and went ice climbing. Guides can be hired from most good ski or board shops and it cost about NZ$100 for a half day of climbing on a frozen waterfall with ice axes and crampons. After the initial fear of having to trust completely foreign equipment the rush was amazing climbing a vertical wall of ice.

The winter pipe and park in Tignes and Val D'Isere are open now. The pipe is very nice with long transitions when they shape it, but they only shape it every four or five days. After the second day it gets reduced to a pair of kinked walls with the occasional good hit. A major bonis is that the pipe has its own drag lift that eliminates the hassle of hiking all day! The parks are in their early stages with only the occasional good hit and a lot of dodgy kicks and landings. Unfortunately there is no boardercross track yet, which is getting frustrating! Coming up this month will be weekly slopestyle, halfpipe and boardercross competitions that should provide plenty of entertainment.

We've also done a couple of days at Sainte Foy, which is a small resort 20 minutes down the valley from Tignes that NOONE goes to! A season pass is about 1300 French Francs (about NZ$400) and the field is renowned for it's powder and trees. We went there a week after the last snowfall at Tignes and were still able to get lift-accessed fresh tracks. I estimated there were about 100 people on the entire mountain each day. There's only a very small village that services the mountain and it's not right at the base of the lifts but I'd definitely recommend it as a consideration of somewhere cheap to do a season in Europe if riding, rather than partying, is what you want.

It's February now and the regulars are calling this a very lean season. Storms that look like setting in for a day or more disappear within a few hours leaving barely enough snow to cover the old tracks. The first week of Feb was starting to look better with almost 50cm of fresh in a few days. Sadly that was followed by three days of melting when the temperature reached +10 degrees! Everyone's fingers are crossed that it's going to turn into an epic late season.

I haven't found any work yet but I haven't really looked much since the first week I was here. But it's certainly a difficult area to find cheap accommodation and a good job compared to most North American areas. Most English speaking workers are hired in the summer from England and accommodation is included but if you don't get one of those jobs then you have to be prepared to rough it and spend a lot of money until you stumble into the right person at the right time and you land the job you want/need.

Shaydar. / boarderzone team

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