Jumping, St Patrick’s Day and The X Games (for Natives.co.uk)

When I returned to Les Arcs from my week in London, I was surprised and disappointed to find that there was practically NO SNOW. I’m not even exaggerating. While I’d been away they’d had glorious sunshine for 7 days straight, meaning that all the snow had either melted or turned to ice…not much fun eh?

But magically, the day after I got back, the clouds descended and the snow fell overnight. Lots of it. So off we went up to the Jacques piste to play in the powder (a new challenge for me on a board) and build our own epic kicker jump just off the side of the slope. We spent the next few days throwing ourselves off this little jump, with some interesting results. We landed a few; we didn’t land a few more. There were some minor injuries and a fair few bruises, but was it worth it? Totally. For those few seconds when you approach the jump and in your head you’re going ‘oh man, I’m gonna die’ (the jump was a lot bigger than anything I’d ever gone over before), and then you go over the edge, fly for a few more epic seconds and land in the soft cloud of powder below, there’s nothing quite like it. The jump is still there at the top of St Jacques, if you want to go ahead and try it!

The remainder of last week was filled with a few boarding sessions, a lot of movie watching (the weather turned from beautiful sunny days to a total white-out) and some work to fill my time (and my wallet). Then on Sunday night we headed out to celebrate St Paddy’s day, first by hitting up the Bowling alley, a great place to hang out with some friends and a few beers, and then it was on to Whistler’s bar, where it seemed like the entire resort was partying the night away in their green hats and animal suits (don’t ask…I have no idea why?!).

Throughout the last two weeks the snow has been falling like crazy – we got over a foot in about 2 days, making for some amazing boarding and skiing. The other day I went out in the fresh powder and tried my hand at some major moguls on the red runs, with pretty good success I might add, not bad for my first reds of the season! Can you tell I’m kinda proud of myself?

Then yesterday, we got the opportunity to head over to Tignes for the first day of the European X Games. And even though it totally bucketed it down with a fresh load of snow, and we were pretty freezing cold all day, when we got right to the front of the crowd to watch the Men’s Superpipe Qualifiers, it really didn’t seem to matter. Seeing these guys throwing some epic tricks as they sped down this massive half pipe was just incredible…definitely worth a watch if you can find it online (and you may even seen me and my friends on the screen!). So all in all a pretty successful few weeks…only 3 weeks until this glorious winter season is over and it’s time to head back to reality.