Comment Share Posted on Wednesday February 24th at 1:53 p.m.

From sleeping on the floor and eating off awkwardly low tables… to eating off the floor and sleeping awkwardly under low tables.

Same format: Photos of things I've been jumping off and places I've been with a brief what I've been up to and a longer what I've been laughing at. Hopefully the pics will tell a thousand words if you're short on time, literacy or Ritalin.

A day in the life

My alarm clock talks to me in French, ‘Levee vous, es sept heur, levee vous, es sept heur...' I press snooze and sacrifice my morning shower. Pete rolls over in the bunk above mine and mumbles something in his sleep. Tells me later he dreamt that his friend was half-helicopter and crashed into his other friend. Messy. A quick breakfast of a cereal called ‘smacks' and a pain du chocolat, with the photo below as my view.

It's snowing outside so I wear my ski jacket to walk to work. Footsteps down the main street have compressed the new snow so I play a game of shoe slide, running and jumping and sliding around. Walking around with my arms outstretched and face pointed skywards, trying to catch snowflakes on my tongue. People look at me like I'm a little kid. I am.

Salut! Cava? Oui, et toi? Pas mal. I turn on the workshop machines and get ready to tune some skis. I hide in the workshop doing that until rentals gets busy and I struggle to stretch my French far enough to get Parisians into boots and out the door holding skis.

Lunch is a visit to the bakery across the road. A sandwich here is a filled baguette. French bread, get it? Two and a half hours, so I go home/sleep, go skiing, hang out with my friends or here, to an internet café.

Work late, we start drinking beers once the shop closes as we tune all the returned rental skis. My French boss makes dirty jokes in English;
Hey Neil what did you eat for lunch?
Chicken pasta, why's that?
I ate pussy.
Then he sticks the air gun down my pants as he walks past.

Don't get home till late but my apartment is cosy and dinner is waiting on the table as the rest of my flatmates watch Planet Earth or Ricky Gervais on the laptop. We exchange yarns, my favourite ones come later in this piece...

It's my weekend!

Mondays and Tuesdays off. I'm free to ski open till close, and try to avoid being coerced into mid-week drinking. Pete keeps his promise of getting up earlyish to come shred with me even though he's hungover. One of the best of the 5 resorts in the valley is walking distance from our house, close enough that we put on our boots before we leave the house. We look out of place here with our bright colours and rockered twin tips, but I love it. Days that we go to other resorts we have to sprint to catch the free bus because Pete forgot his avalanche transceiver.

Shredding... sooooo good. Meet friends up there and share secret spot sessions. Knowledge is powder here and everyone wants to ride with people who've done seasons in Chamonix before. Finding fun stuff to do and trying to get photos of it. The thing that blows my mind the most is almost a direct quote from the late, great Doug Coombs; the craziest things about Europe is walking down the fashion parade of an expensive European street on the way to getting on a gondola to the top of a glacier where scores of people die every year. All the photos in the slideshow below are taken on one run, not a bad one.

Home in that warm afterglow of a good day on the hill. Stretches, showers and sleep. Salubrious salutations with sometimes sober friends. In my mind this moment lasts forever.

Yarns!

Pete's Piece:

Pete has a bad day. This is 2 weeks after he front flips off a cliff and knees himself in the face so hard that his brand new 600 Euro ($1200 NZD) high definition helmet-camera comes off his helmet and is lost in the powder. It stays lost after almost 3 hours of us digging for it as the snow keeps coming down.

This time it's a bluebird powder day and he's the motivator as I'm slow to rise after a 50 hour week with some mid-week partying. The gondola to our favourite resort (Brevent-Flegere) may be within walking distance but it's up a steep hill. At the top Pete realizes that he's forgotten his pass. No friends on a powder day, I go.

Charge my first two runs with our Swedish ski buddy Ivar, air into a chute and straightline out. Pete wants it too and we see him storming into it as we ride up the chair, he's going mach 10, trying to catch up to us. He takes the air into the chute way too deep, almost lands on a rock and looks like he's going to ski straight into a wall. Puts everything he has into a turn to save himself but it's too much, he catches an edge, and flips over the lower right and side of the rock band, lands between that and another set of rocks, bounces over those too and stops after another couple of bounces just short of the other wall of the chute. One of the bounces was on his head, upside down and backwards, his neck is sore and his skis are jammed deep in the snow ten meters above him. One of his skis is bent so badly it can't be repaired. It's as good as broken and he needs them for the competitions coming up. Pete takes his broken skis home and gets his other, softer, skis.

So now Pete has walked up the killer steep hill 3 times today and he's not happy about it. He goes back to show the chute line who's boss. Scoping from the chairlift (this line is directly under the chair, such a glory send) he decides he's going to turn it into a double stage, airing from the top onto a pad of snow, over some more rocks and into the chute. Coming in he turns his music off to concentrate. Pop, air, stomp, air, crash. Crashes even worse than last time and bounces about 10 times. As he is rag dolling the kill switch for his tunes is being knocked on and off, but it stays on when he's finished crashing. He lies there for a second and realizes that it's a song by Muse. The lyrics serenade him- ‘making the same mistakes again'.

Luckily Pete is fine now and has got some new skis, we're getting amped for our competitions.

The Jono Wills tribute album:

Jono Wills, my doctor buddy from Tauranga that I met in Tahoe last season, the guy who invited me to come live in the house he'd helped organize here in Cham, had a bad stroke of luck and broke his leg, boot-top tibula and fibula snap. Full on ninety degree break, third knee style, shin sticking out forwards.

Skiing deep pow through some trees on a flat light day Jono popped over a pillow which turned out to be a 6 meter drop onto a flat, hard, cat track. One ski released but the other didn't and he ended up with his face touching his ski tip. Thinking his ski was broken he rolled over and realized it was doing a lot better than his leg. Man and doctor instincts take control and he kicks the ski with his good leg, straightening out the ultimate version of shin bang. Drugs, operation, rod and screws plus 4 days in hospital later he's back with us in our unfortunately top story apartment. He's out for the season. Gutted.

Also this is after his girlfriend Michele left her facebook logged in (on the communal computer we use to scam internet), and Andrew changed her relationship status to ‘engaged', to get her back for her making him friends with a girl from his work that he finds unbelievably annoying. Congratulatory phone calls from all over the world quickly turned into awkward explanations, and plenty of jokes within the flat. Just not Jono's week I suppose. Above are some of my favourite photos of him from the epic last month.

Getting pissed:

Colby West (pro skier) makes an advert for the ‘epic pass', in the style of an infomercial, to take the piss. It's hilarious. I show it to my flat on youtube (youtube 'colby west epic pass'), and encourage them to pay attention by claiming I will drink my own piss if no one laughs. My friends being my friends they all put their best effort into not cracking a smile, and manage to get through the clip. Days later we're drinking at a friends place and I accept my fate and urinate into an empty bottle of cheap whiskey. I put it in the fridge to cool and some of my other pals, being my pals, try to swap it for their own.

Managing to hold onto the dubious success of ensuring that it is my own excrement that I'm about to ingest, I get it down me on video. It tastes terrible, so much worse than I expected, I gag mid-skull and battle to hold it down, then turn pale and look unhappy. I realize that the massive amounts of smelly French cheese and red wine that I had at my work do and hour or two before probably didn't help the situation, and combined with the taint of the cheapest whiskey combine to produce a truly regrettable taste sensation. The verdict: that liquid is coming out of you for a reason, if you really want to make use of it then water your plants (it's actually really good for them), or practice writing your name in the snow.

Australia day? Fuck that it's my birthday!

It's my birthday (and Australia Day) and we're sessioning crud and hiking pow at Flegere. The cloud comes in and we lose visibility so we head into the café for lunch. We take a seat and set about destroying the left over lasagna that we've bought for lunch. It's not enough though and Pete and I are looking around for tables to hawk (get left over food from). We're sitting next to the counter and an English guy is handed his freshly cooked salmon bagel- that he immediately drops on the floor. A big communal ‘awwwww' of sympathy is followed by both his and my eyes being locked on the exploded bagel, and its now ski-boot floor smeared contents. I look up at him. He looks back at me. With an encouraging whisper of ‘you're not above that bro!' from Pete I bust out the classic line:

‘Are you going to eat that?'
English homeboy looks at me like I asked if I can get a refund from a condom machine by inserting a baby in the dispensing slot.
‘No', he says blandly.
‘Well I'm going to if you're not', I'm almost pleading him.
‘Go for it', blandness is turning to amused disgust.
So I quickly start re-assembling the bagel, conscientiously observing the five second rule. As I do Pete calls to the guy, ‘it's his birthday too!'
So the guy looks down at me as I scrabble around his feet, trying to put gherkins back on lettuce, and says in the driest English accent: ‘Happy birthday mate'.
Somehow he managed to enunciate the lack of an exclamation mark.
I pop up with my prize, a victorious hunter-gatherer. By this time the French cashier has arrived with a rubbish bin that she thinks I want to put the bagel in. She offers it to me and I retract, saying ‘no I want to eat this'.
‘Quoi?'
‘Je manger ca' (which translates to- ‘I to eat that', but she must have understood because she answered in the most morbidly disbelieving tone...)
‘Non... you uncouth heathen'. The last part was said with her eyes. But she left me to share my bounty with my friends, laughing and relishing in the furtive glances from the restaurant.

We finished up and scored an epic powder run to end the day, then headed home to make party, making sure to act like dickheads and sing ‘Aussie aussie aussie, oi oi oi!' on the way. Got to do our bit to keep their reputation in taters. Photos of our pow hike and my birthday party below, got crowd surfed around my apartment! Then photos of our buddy Jonny's Kingswood birthday cake.

Smooth talking, classy Kiwis:

Somewhere between the skiing and fifty hour weeks we get some partying done. Usually it's for a special occasion, like our boy Smoothy arriving! He's here to stay with us for a bit before we travel around to the comps together. We're having a couple of beers with a couple of friends at our house before we head out to a dance party. It's still pretty early but we've got a few down us so it's that stage of the night where everyone is getting tipsy but feels socially obligated to still attempt intelligent conversation. My Canadian workmate Jade starts it off:

Jade: So we've just had Australia day (Jade found out all about that living with aussies), what's the most important day in New Zealand?
Smoothy: Christmas Eve.
Me and Pete: Don't you mean Waitangi day bro?
Smoothy: Nah I love Christmas Eve!
Classic. Now it's Pete's turn to ask Jade a question:

So you're from Quebec Jade, I heard that some people there want it to be a separate country from Canada?
Jade: Yeah that's right.
Pete: So if Quebec was a separate country.... what would you call it?
Me: They'd probably call it Quebec man.

Our new roommate Chris Brown (great name ay) then backs this up by talking directly to Jade's breasts, and I contribute by trying to run up a frosty car on the way to the party and sliding out, landing directly on my back on the bonnet before sliding off backwards onto my head. Classy kiwis. I get home earlier than the others because I have to work the next day and pass out. Later Pete gets home, opens the door to our room, looks at me, doesn't say a word, and closes the door again. Maybe he thinks I have a girl in my bed, which I don't. Anyway he chooses to sleep on the ground outside our door instead, soundly enough that when Jono, Michele and Chris Brown discover him they get artistic on his face. Note the smith goggles in the picture, because I'm sure Smith is keen to be associated with this kind of professional athletic behavior.

And since I wrote this Chris Brown skied into a tree a messed up his head and wrist, he's OK but can't ski for a while and I don't have any pics.

Oh yeah and we got to watch the world tour Chamonix stop too here are some pics. This isn't where Sam podiumed though he won at Engadin.

More about me:

Check out the sweet article that my buddy Anna Pearson wrote about me:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/features/focus/3037527/Living-on-the-edge-and-loving-it

And here's my surfanic team riders profile:

http://www.momentumsports.co.nz/ourtestteam.html

C'est fin!

By the time I've got around to posting this we've actually competed in our first couple of comps. I had a bad run, getting lost and missing my line at Flaine (France) then crashing at Engadin (Switzerland). Dented my helmet and smashed my camera, bruising my shin bone too. Pete qualified 5th for both comps (shot bro!) but crashed in both finals (still good enough to move him up to 26th in the World Tour Qualifier rankings). Our Scottish buddy that we're traveling with got lost at Flaine too and sent a decent cliff at Engadin but lost control a bit at the top and didn't qualify for finals. Smoothy crashed at Flaine but then went onto win at Engadin, doing NZ proud. His parents were there and his Mum cried, and the kiwi boys did a haka at prize giving. After that he moved on to the invite only competition in Fieberbrunn (Austria) but crashed and broke his leg. Better stories and pics about the competition road trip next blog (we haven't finished it yet!). Have you really read this whole thing? Damn!