Why I Love This Photo - No.5

After last week's excellent blog post from Michael about confessions of a lunch and private ski instructor, I thought it would be good to return from mouth-watering experiences in summer, to a visual insight into skiing in the winter. Continuing in the series of 'Why I Love This Photo', I want to share how amazing the high mountains and off-piste skiing can be. Most of us mere skiing mortals are exposed to loads of radical videos, images and stories demonstrated by hard core Dude types and ski bum heros. Most of these antics would appear unrealistic and way beyond the reach of 99% of the skiing population. Perhaps I'm guilty in the past of publishing these videos on mh2ski's Facebook and other Social Media resources, but is it actually possible to ski similar off piste routes?

Yes is the answer. About three winters ago I first skied with Gilly and John. If you are a regular reader you may be familiar with them. Their goal was to continue improving their skiing and gain confidence especially away from the perfectly groomed pistes that Meribel has oodles of. I won't go into everything here, but needless to say they have progressed fantastically to the point that I am now able to take them into some impressive terrain. One such day was when we dropped into the Vallees des Avals.

So why do I like this photo? I love how you can see the deep powder with the tracks in the snow. I also love the sense of drama shown by the deep valley floor below in the photo. As mentioned before in previous blog posts, it can be quite tricky showing the sense of scale in photographs, I think this image shows it quite well here. But most importantly, I love how this photo is a reminder of a wonderful day shared with Gilly and John.

If you would like to read more about this day, including how we benefitted from a very bizarre experience in the middle of nowhere, click here for the link. Please feel free to share away on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ by using the social media icons below. Or you can leave a comment, it's always nice hearing from readers.

Next week I shall post another photo from last winter, this time nothing to do with radical off piste, cool dude skiing. We will be back to a more civilised green piste environment. So if you are new to this blog or website and may think that Michael and I are only into being off piste private ski instructors, this is far from the truth. Have a great weekend, and please come back next week. Martin.