Off-piste but not off limits

By STEPHEN WOOD

Skiers who habitually make an effort to look their best will not need this advice. But those who tend towards laziness when the slopes are similarly inclined should always remember that a ski instructor is like a driving-test examiner.

Anyone who wants to pass a driving test has to put on a performance. Looking in the rear-view mirror needs to be treated like an audition for the local repertory society, the head swinging from side to side for full, dramatic effect, and taking a corner should be a laborious process, hands shuffling around the steering wheel rather than swinging with the careless abandon of a qualified driver.

Similarly, skiers hoping to advance from "intermediate" to "advanced" status must make a show of their mastery of on-piste techniques before an instructor will take them off-piste. If they don't they will find themselves still on-piste and being taught things they already know, as I did last season at the Whistler Blackcomb resort in British Columbia.

To my shame, I have never got the hang of off-piste skiing. Traversing between pistes, yes; dropping into the odd snowbowl at Vail and the Nevis Range in Scotland; even once, unwisely, tackling the steep snowfield below the Valluga at St Anton on a pair of metre-long snowboards.

I've done all that but if I had had any illusions about my abilities they would have been shattered by a morning spent trying to follow a group of much better skiers down the off-piste route from the Cime de Caron ridge to Val Thorens.

They all strolled it. I arrived at the bottom huffing and puffing, sweating and swearing, with pockets full of snow.

Does that sound familiar? Quite possibly, since it is the fate of many recreational skiers who reach an intermediate level and progress no further.

The widely accepted explanation for this is that poor technique can take you only so far. In the book Off Piste, for example, Wayne Watson says that, "eventually, the lack of basics will show through, and nowhere in skiing is good technique as important as off-piste".

But that is only a partial explanation, since there are technically good skiers who also have difficulty mastering off-piste skiing. And there are instructors of international renown who say that anyone capable of carving a turn on-piste should be able to apply the same technique when he or she moves off the piste.

The underlying problem is a fear of snow, I suspect. On-piste, there is only one kind of snow. A change of temperature will transform it into something trickier, such as ice or slush, but as long as it remains snowy a groomed piste will provide a surface that responds consistently to a sharp ski-edge.

Off-piste, intermediate skiers' lack of confidence is probably caused not so much by what they do as by what the snow does to their skis.

On my unsuccessful descent of the 3195m Cime de Caron, the ski surface had a frozen layer not strong enough to support a skier's weight with deep, soft snow beneath. This condition is called "breakable crust", and in the unlikely event that you have tried water-skiing with your skis still underwater you will have some idea how it feels.

Breakable crust is unpleasant for any skier; but it is doubtful whether I would have had much more fun on "crud", "death cookies", "mashed potato" or even "champagne powder".

The sheer unpredictability of the surface would have sapped my confidence enough to make me forget what technique I possess.

The pisted area at Whistler Blackcomb is one of the best-designed in the world, with most parts of the two mountainsides accessible to skiers of all abilities.

Nevertheless, I decided to devote a day there to skiing off-piste. It was, surprisingly, a struggle to arrange a morning's specialist tuition, and I wasted half of it by being too laid-back on the first run.

The instructor, Suzie Black, was sufficiently alarmed by my lack of style to immediately have me doing basic drills: arms out like an aircraft, reaching across the downhill ski, and so on.

Luckily, I succeeded in convincing her that it was safe to take me on to unpisted pitches and into the trees.

Black agrees that confidence is one critical factor when intermediates head off-piste. Another, she adds, is balance. "They want to do off-piste what they can do on the groomed stuff, and they get frustrated when they can't achieve that," she says.

"The problem is often that they're not properly centred, with their weight right over their feet. It takes discipline to do that: you have to push your arms out in front to maintain the correct stance."

She reckons it takes only a couple of lessons to get the knack, "but skiers who can really rip on-piste are reluctant to do that. Rather than advance, they get stuck in a rut."

Just a single lesson made a difference, moving me at least a few steps along the spectrum from "tentative" to "aggressive".

Equally helpful were some well-chosen words from the doyen of ski correspondents, Arnie Wilson of the Financial Times - a skier I had tried to follow down to Val Thorens.

When I skied off-piste with him the following day on Blackcomb, he spared me the metaphors that instructors seem to find so helpful; instead he merely passed on tips, suggesting that "you might put a little more weight on the outside ski" and that "you could lean a touch further forward on the bumps".

Every piece of advice he offered produced satisfying results. Will it stick? Have I finally got the hang of off-piste skiing?

I'm still waiting to find out. But I know beginners have a tough time and few make it. Figures from the United States show that only 15 per cent of those who take beginners' lessons mature into fully fledged skiers or boarders. Still. There's hope.

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