Closing In

It is hard to keep thoughts from straying towards the end of the season and beyond. Rumours abound about which chalets will be closing down early and whether the summary firing of employees for cost cutting purposes actually takes place. Your host, for one, believes that perhaps this is not the case but others swear its veracity. And so the questions and conversations turn more towards the possibility of future seasons and impending joblessness.

Some just jump off the cliff

There are those who are almost financially obliged to return to the mountains next winter, and there are those who can think of no other life than the migratory transience of the perpetual seasonaire. It truly is a strange lifestyle, the relentless weeks pass with such regularity, a strange kind of monotony builds, for the work is never quite the same and yet never changes. The catering and hospitality arena is a tough gig to play day in and day out. Day and night fade into the background as each shift is separated not by time but by opportunities, for sleep, for skiing, for eating. Down time is a cursed commodity, our time out here is necessarily limited by the survival of the snow. Any time used doing nothing is time lost to fully experience the alpine adventure. Guilt plays against tiredness, sometimes one overcomes the other but not for long.

It is almost criminal to miss a powder day

The cooking and hosting has become another automatic and with the exception of certain days, the skiing has merged into one vague mountainesque experience. It is hard to describe to non skiers just what the feeling of a good day on the mountain or a good run is like. The closest this host can get is to a gamer on a hot streak or in a state of flow. Where every move is necessary and perfectly placed, the skis become an extension of the body in effortless physical poetry and the skier is to the slope as the bird is to the sky, born to glide with ease over the snow. It is in essence a form of escapism, to be wholly absorbed by the concentration in the moment is to leave behind all other considerations, worrying only about whether the punter in front is about to turn or not.

Sometimes the skier is the bird

Marching On

Time is a funny thing out here, there are moments in the day that stretch out to forever and others which flash by before you realize they have happened. In the 5 minutes before getting up, before going to work dread and the desire to curl up in a coma strike and claim your very being. An eternity entices you back to bed to ignore all duty. Fortunately this passes as you pull back the covers and make a start for the day.

Once breakfast is underway all earlier feelings are from another lifetime as the morning melts into early afternoon. Cooking and cleaning pass in a flash until the last couple of minutes, returning to outdoor shoes and taking out the rubbish, anticipating and hoping for good snow conditions.

With so little of the season left, guests become a gestalt entity, names and faces all merge into one so that your host has no idea which rooms are occupied let alone who occupies them. The repetitive nature of the job has killed all natural conversation with the guests, even the weekly cliches have lost their charm, and it has left your host with nothing but a defeated "yes" in response.

When there is no fresh snow the general consensus leans towards a day in the park. Using the jumps and boxes to do grievous bodily harm to ourselves and look reall really cool. But scant snow changes the character of the pistes, the snow packs down and becomes a solid smooth surface that shoots the skier off at all time new speeds, cruising becomes the order of the day. So too do sudden evasive maneuvers and irate frenchmen as your host casually bombs past leaving them in a cloudy of icy spray.

Falling The Feasts and The Famines

We sow our crops as soon as the first new guests enter the resort, we cultivate and care for them, feed and water them and hope our seed has been planted in fertile soil. We harvest every Sunday as the guests leave the chalet. Some weeks it is a good harvest, other weeks it is not so good. We can expend all the time and effort we have but if the ground is not receptive, nothing will grow and we will be left with nothing.

It can be tricky to gauge at the start of the week just how big the harvest will be, though it does become apparent through the week as you weigh up the characters of the guests and their likely tipping output. Most weeks for you host have been very bountiful and to all our guests I send my warmest thanks.

Half term is a strange time of year, the children crawl out of the classrooms and are herded onto the slopes, all shouting and crying and eating and running and taking up space on the piste. It does baffle the mind when the ESF (Ecole de Ski Francais - the local ski teaching racket) take their young charges through the ski park.

Your typical Park Rat grinding a box

The ski park is where people go when they decide that skiing just is not dangerous enough, full of jumps and boxes and rails, every piece is designed to break bones and shatter dreams. And these ESF chaps guide these small children over jumps and boxes. So now a favourite game is to take a crate of bevvies to the bottom of the park and consume everytime one of these little buggers falls over, extra points for pile ups.