Snowboarding in Chamonix

Day #5 & #6

Finally the days I have been looking forward for the most. For these two days we had to choose if we wanted to do skiing or snowboarding. Everyone chose the skis except me and Alex (+Josh, but he couldn't join the residential unfortunately, so it was just me and Alex on snowboard). 

Before jumping on the hills we had instructors to teach us the basics and get us started. After an hour of practicing we took ski lift and went on a small slope. It was sad but also incredibly fun to watch how Alex fell over a few times and after 4th attempt made it to the end. To be honest I really hate those lifts where you have to stick something between your legs, because last time I ripped my trousers on it, and that's where fun ended…

 Anyways I think I picked up snowboarding quite quickly and after our lunch I went higher with Richard (our first year manager in UCB). We took two different lifts, first was Gondola, which was absolutely fine, but the second one is the one that I was really scared of for some reason.

 I just knew that I'm going to either fall off, get stuck or can't get off at all - Yea I was pretty much panicking in my head. Obviously nothing interesting happened. So we took the easiest blue track, which was really good - nice, long and smooth downhill parts and most importantly it was wide! We also saw the top of Mont Blanc, which is already in the list of future treks.

We had time for another run and once we reached the end Richard asked me:" Okay Kristjan, there's two ways of getting back, 1) you take the gondola or 2) you come with me… down the red." I knew I couldn't go on the red, because I already struggled on green, but it was just too tempting, so I went with red to have a nice finish for the amazing day. After the first turn, I knew it was a bad choice, but going back was definitely out of the question. There was one bit of the track which was all covered in ice and of course I fell on that slope. The bad thing was I couldn't stop. At first, I just laughed, but once I saw the signs "Stop, turn left, end of track" I started to get more "concerned". Eventually I just went through or under the signs, just like playing limbo, and finally… managed to stop, with a tiny heart attack.

On the second day of snowboarding we had to ascend atleast 2000 meters because it was raining in the valley. The tracks over there felt much easier and smoother, also because snow was fresh and soft. So we had a go on one of the blue tracks, which was actually really good but felt like going down a 90 degree wall for me.