Chamonix, France

I have been working these past few days on writing about my experience with my parents this past weekend in Nice, France but instead I find myself posting about another French experience.  For some reason or another I have been thinking about snowboarding recently and had a nice little chat with a friend of mine in Australia who will be going in a few days to New Zealand to hit the slopes. They topic went to boarding in powder and I immediately thought of a string on embarrassing photos that were taken last December while on a trip to Chamonix.

A group of friends and I decided to spend the Christmas four day weekend living the high life in the Mont Blanc Valley of France. I had started snowboarding in 2010 and had hit all the countries of the Alps aside from France. Being the Francophile that I am, it was high time to plan a trip.  What is so great about the Mont Blanc Valley, is that there are SO MANY places to board or ski, and you can do it all on one lift ticket.  This gives you the opportunity to ski a different area everyday you are there, if you so choose.

On our third day we decided on an area that we had heard had a lot of powder. We had a good group of boarders/ skiers, but only one or two that was really comfortable in powder, so we knew it would be a challenge.

Part of the fateful run

 



 

I will not sit here and say that I was the worst performance of the day (my friend Mike was pretty G-d awful), but I was pretty bad. The problem with snowboarding is, when at the intermediate level, you tend to get cocky at times. This is what happened to me right before my meeting with a tree was caught on tape by a “Go Pro.” I had experienced a few good minutes (these trails down the mountain could take up to 45 minutes) without any catastrophic crash so I was feeling lucky. I was finding my rhythm, leaning most weight on my back foot to keep the front end of the board up and out of the snow.  I was making my little carves and dodging bushes and trees with no great difficulty while pummeling through a few sparse ones that didn’t look like they would offer any trouble. This was my major miscalculation of the day.  About 200m in front of me was a tree that looked like it wouldn't put up any resistance if I just tried to barrel through it. I was wrong. The whole thing was in slow motion, perhaps because I didn’t have enough speed in the first place, and my friend had his Go Pro ready the second he saw me gunning for the tree. What happened next can be best described in photos…

 

Honestly, I don’t think I really have anything left to say about this aside from begging you to all please contain your laughter…