Finally, they’ve opened up the glacier area at Les Diablerets. It’s pretty small, one chair and three t-bars plus a couple of cable-cars for access. The terrain isn’t actually very challenging and it’s one of the flattest glaciers I’ve ever skied on. But, it was a beautiful day, around freezing with clear blue skies and sunshine, a really excellent day to be in the mountains.

It was very intriguing to see a small aircraft landed on the glacier, I’m really sure it wasn’t there when we arrived but I certainly didn’t see it land.

While conditions on the glacier were quite pleasant looking around the nearby mountains it’s fairly obvious that snowfall’s been pretty limited so far. In fact there was more this time last year but that did mostly melt during December so it’s hard to say what the season outlook is yet. This picture (click for full size) you can get some idea of the snow levels nearby.

I was primarily in Tignes to attend the ICE Performance Course, this is basically a BASI (British Association of Snowsport Instructors) course and used mostly by people doing a BASI 2 or 3 assessments as a preparation or refresher. The instructor for the week was Mark Jones who ran a really excellent course and managed to balance the levels between the BASI 3 and 2 people really well. Interestingly, there was an ESF instructor on the course which gave an different perspective on things.

This was the week when the cable car incident occurred and I was standing underneath it at the time, I phoned up PG at Snowheads who posted up a quick report, full details here.

I also got a day skiing with Toby Fischel, I’ve been skiing with Toby for a few seasons now so it’s always good to get on the slopes with him.