Hey Chaps:

After much delay, and because once I started I found it hard to stop, is the official Simon Bedford diary of the trip of a lifetime. I don't know what the conditions are like now, but last week they were spectacular. Andy, I'm on for another short trip, say to Chamonix, but Verbier does seem to be getting all the rave press for the off-piste this year, end of March or what?

Day 1, Thursday 4/2/99

I'm supposedly off on the Airtours one-day trip to Chamonix. I'd originally intended to come back to London for the Friday and then go out to La Grave on the Eurostar on Saturday, but the conditions were looking far too good for that sort of mucking about, so I decided to stay over for the Friday and make my way to La Grave on Saturday. At the check-in the girl pointed out that I may not get to France at all as my passport ran out ten days previously. Not a good start, but I decided to try to chance it through Geneva airport and luckily had no problem.

Rolling up to Chamonix on the bus, I arranged to meet Andy Sloan and Ed Elliott at the Plan Joran restaurant on the Grand Montet at 1pm, so I had time to do a couple of runs with a US snowboarder called Mike who I met on the bus. Bright sun and pretty cold, but the snow was getting a little tired off-piste. Andy and Ed were with Ed's brother Gavin, and we had some good runs on the Bochard and in the Lavencher bowl.

The top of the Grand Montet was closed because the high winds have blown all the snow off the top and have left nothing but sheet ice. Until there's a lot more snow its going to remain closed.

I'm staying with Andy and Ed in Les Houches at Les Lebeyroux, a chalet run by Claire and Pascal, respectively demon chef and guide.

Day 2 , Friday 5/2/99

Snowing. Guided by Pascal, we spent an insane day in the Dream Forest on the Grand Montet, jumping off everything we could find and videoing the resulting wipe-outs/landings. The storm that was to cause the avalanche in Montroc on Tuesday was just starting and the snow was already beginning to pile up.

Day 3 , Saturday 6/2/99

Big Snow. Caroline from La Chaumine rang to say that there's a bus going from Chamonix to La Grave at 5.00pm, which was brilliant as it gave me another bonus day skiing that I didn't expect. Andy and I skiied Les Houches and we had a great morning trying to find first tracks. I managed to have one of my biggest wipe-outs by skiing straight at/off a Boarder-X berm that had been banked up for a snowboard event. In the generally bad visibility, and with the beautifully soft and deep powder, I't see this 1.5m bank until I was about 3m from it. I travelled a good 5m horizontally and landed elegantly in a heap (skis together; looking good), got up, dusted myself off and skied away thinking "WHAT THE **** WAS THAT". The only frightening thing was that I didn't see it coming. Big lesson. Learn.

Once the off-piste had been skied out we ended up doing high speed super-G turns down a virtually empty red run, which was good fun as the pistes were empty. Ed joined us, and with his greater local knowledge quickly mananged to get us completely lost in the trees on the St Gervais side. On our last run down I had three or four turns down a steep little pitch where the snow was going right over my head; real face-shots: an unbelievable feeling and quite wonderful as this trip to Chamonix was just the warm-up to the real stuff in La Grave.

Day 4, Saturday 7/2/99

Snowing hard in La Grave. Stefan Palm is our guide and I'm skiing with Jokum and Mark, another Brit who's here for the week. La Meije had just opened on Thursday for the first time this season and we spent the day skiing from P3 down to P1 many times. There's so much snow in the gullies that each turn is setting off mini slides, and the tree-skiing is superb. Three warm up days in Chamonix have obviously done some good, as I don't feel quite ready to die before supper. Normally at the end of the first day in La Grave I'm so tired I'm thinking of going home on the next plane as I can never see how it's going to improve, but this year I crawl to the dining room with a spring in my knees.

Day 5, Monday 8/2/99

More snow and high wind. Today we're skiing with a local French guide who is confusingly also called Stefan, because Stefan Palm is having his back sorted. The lift from P2 to P3 is closed, so we're in the trees below P2 all day. The snow is everything you could hope for: light & fluffy and thigh-deep and the X-Mountains are doing their stuff. The glaciers below La Meije are an opal blue/green. Beautiful and scary. We don't hang about sightseeing too long

Day 6, Tuesday 9/2/99

La Meije was closed because of the amount of snow, so we spent the morning practising avalanche search & rescue stuff: looking for first one transceiver individually, and then three transceivers as a team.

The local station above La Chaumine eventually opened and we all went up to Le Chazelet which had one poma open. I found that my X-Mountains were just submarining to a halt on the red piste gradient. I was putting so much strain on my boots and heels that I didn't fancy getting a blister because of the combat skiing conditions, so after 2 runs I called it a day and retired to the local creperie. The others came in a short time later admitting defeat as well. There's always tomorrow.

Day 7, Wednesday 10/2/99

La Meije still closed, but with bright sun, perfect powder, and a brand new pair of Rossi Bandit XXX fresh out the box, we went back up to Le Chazelet to have some fun. It may not be La Meije, but at least there were lifts open and knee-deep powder with fresh tracks most of the day. Although there is a lot of new snow, the rocks are still just under the surface on the ridges where the wind has been blowing continuously, and we're all scraping our skis too often. One scary moment came when I had fallen and was fishing for my pole. I looked up to find a 100m wide slab of the mountain coming down at me with a guide standing in the middle, trying to stay upright. I looked at this thing for a few seconds and sort-of calculated that it wasn't going to get to me, but just in case I got my skis ready pointing downhill. It stopped about 25m above me, and was not really serious, but it still made me think.

We ended off the day with a glorious run down from Le Chazelet to La Grave through Les Terraces, finishing off by dropping down on to the roof of the Maison du Pain in La Grave. I hope the owner of the little hut gets compensation from the Marie for any damage as I'm sure the poor little building can't take too much of that treatment throughout the season and remain standing. The trouble is it's the most inviting thing to aim for..

Day 8, Thursday 11/2/99

La Meije reopened today, and as we arrived at the Teleferique we were given a printed warning by the Marie telling us strongly of the danger of the conditions and to take care. This is the first time I'd ever seen something like this and reinforces the general news we'd heard from other areas further north: Chamonix with the avalanche, Verbier and Val d'Isere closed down and everyone indoors.

Here on La Meije the conditions are wonderful: sunny and very cold (-26c someone said) with the handful of skiers on the mountain all spending the day trying to find first tracks (and mostly succeeeding). At about 3.30 Stefan suggested we do the Freaux couloir back down to the village, but we were too tired for that after a full day of waist deep powder, so we agreed we'd give it a go in the morning. I'd skied it a couple of years ago, and didn't really fancy doing it again with such deep powder on tired legs.

Day 9, Friday 12/2/99

To start with: the Freaux couloir as a warm-up. This couloir, which is about 2000m; vertical down to the valley floor, would be exceptional in any other resort, but is probably (apart from the classic "vallons de La Meije" run) the easiest of three or four alternative ways down to the valley floor in La Grave, and is one of the reasons that La Grave is unique in Europe.

Stefan then suggested something different: five years previously he'd found a route down the ice-falls on the right of P1, and the conditions looked as if they might be right for the first time since then. The couloir was un-named, and we had an interesting time finding the entrance. After an hour or so of traversing and climbing below the P1 traverse we struck lucky. I have never skiied anything like it: dropping three or four meters into unbelievably soft snow, making a slight change of direction and then dropping again. It was only about three or four pitches long and when Stefan shouted back that I should make sure to clear the ice-fall I knew we were in something special. At the back of our small group was Stefan's wife Pia; a seriously good skier who has won the Derby de La Meije Telemark classification many times. It really was a privilege to ski with someone that good. And when she fell coming over the ice-fall that I'd just cleared; what joy!

Day 10, Saturday 13/2/99

After yesterday, anything would be a letdown. Its still cold and sunny, and the snow is beginning to get a bit tired (and so am I); sometimes there's a bit of a crust and sometimes knee-deep powder. Because its Saturday and the day when the Chaumine guides have their day off (they really need it), Jokum and I are skiing with another French Guide, Eric Loubie, who is not happy about the conditions at all. At the bottom of the snow pack there is a six inch layer of rotten hoar-frost which has not bonded at all with the layers above, and combined with the wind-loading its not making the mountain safe at all. Given the lack of snowcover generally, and the really vast crevasses on the glaciers, it was staggering to see the amount of skiers and snowboarders going on to the Chirouze glacier blindly following everyone else's tracks. Jokum left on his coach to Denmark at 6.00pm to get home in 21 hours.

Day 11, Sunday 14/2/99

New people have arrived last night and I've got to leave at 2.00pm, so I skied with Pelle and 5 others. I';d skiied with him before when he'd been telemarking, and that was quick enough, but get him on alpine skiis and he's off. It's beautiful to watch but after the first half of the Vallon run down to the Meije glacier I'm shattered trying to keep up with him. He was worried about the conditions and therefore we were very careful about where we skied. We're tried to find stuff that hadn't been skiied and was not too dangerous but it was getting tricky. To see Pelle, Doug Coombes and his wife Emily all letting fly from the top of the Vallons de La Meije is really something. They are sooo.. good its just sickening. I was getting mighty tired by now, and on the last run down to P1 I flailed in the chopped-up snow. I skied straight through what looked like a mound of snow, to find it was really a large tree-stump, and somersaulting over it (sans skis) managed to hook my ski-pole strap over a bit of the stump. I was left hanging from my right shoulder off this stump trying to get a foothold in the snow so I could lift myself up off the branch. The bummer was that the shoulder that I was hanging from was just recovering from a motor-bike accident I had in London back in November, and it had taken enough of a pounding over the last 11 days without this final stunt. I got down the last few turns pretty well, and was certainly relieved to hang up the skis for a few weeks.

The trip home should have been uneventful, via Grenoble, Paris and the Eurostar, and if I'd read my ticket before leaving La Grave I'd have been alright. But hey, we missed the train by just nine minutes, which meant I got to spend a happy Valentines Day night in Paris, the only cloud being Carol was expecting me to be in London.

Random thoughts

Helmets: Hard to resist the logic so I'm getting one next time I'm in Chamonix or La Grave. I suppose about 5% of skiers and snowboarders in La Grave are wearing them, and I'm joining them next time I ski.

Sony DVC cameras: The toy of the year, slips into a front pocket, and the batteries last nearly all day down to 25c. The best way to end the day is to see the movie back at the Lodge.

APS cameras: I've just got a Minolta with a 3x zoom, and the pictures don't really compare that well to 35mm. However,as with the Sony DVC, the great thing is that its compact enough to be carried in a pocket and not injure you if you fall on it, so some compromise on the quality is inevitable.

Transceivers: I was strongly warned off getting the new digital type tansceivers (Tracker, Ortovox, etc) by the guides at La Chaumine. I have a copy of the french magazine Skieur, which has a critical write-up of them. Apparently if there is more than one transceiver buried the digital ones get confused. It is a known problem and all the manufacturers are working on the problem and will soon have it sorted; I know Andy and Ed have just got Trackers (and I was going to) but the recommendation is still to remain analogue for a year or two. My french isn't good enough to do an authoritative translation, but if anyone wants a copy, get in touch.

Shaped Skis (X-Screams, Bandit XXX) I try to like them but always end up wishing they were a bit straighter. For me, they always seem too eager to turn, and particularly with the Rossi's, the shovels are so enormous that they seem like dinner plates out in front of you, and I found that disconcerting in really tight situations. But then just when you think they're no good you see Pelle disappear into the distance on a pair of X-Screams and you think: Bad workmen, bad tools; rearrange into a well known phrase. Incidentally, all these all-mountain skis now mean that instead of having to have a slalom and a GS ski, I can see that I now need two or three pairs of the new new type; That's the Wonder of Marketing.

I think we were doing an average of 5,500 to 6,000 metres per day, which given the conditions was pretty good. If we'd done this on a heli-ski trip that amount of vertical would have been serious money

For all the above: Just the most incredible ski trip I have ever had, and it would only have been improved if the old lot from 98 had been there. Aah shucks.

"Don't look for the trees, look for the gaps" Stefan Palm

This is the tip for tree skiing and boarding.

"Turns are the first sign of fear" Pelle Lang

Yeh, sure, Pelle.

and next year, it's the Derby pour moi!

Simon B