On the Board with Blair

Adil Latif | Snowboarding-Mont Blanc glacier Descent | ON 6th April 2007 | 0 comments

I arrived in France on Friday night for a quick weekend on the snow with Chris Blair, my friend from Oxford. I mean to say my friend who studied at Oxford, not implying in any way that that I went to Oxford. Chris doesn’t like it when I tell people he went to Oxford, so I won't. Personally, I was over qualified and had to attend the Strathclyde University Business School instead.

We hadn’t seen each other for a while, so I must admit we savoured the cafés and street-side stalls more than we actually spent time on the snow. However, when we did make it on the snow, it was quite rewarding. My snowboarding skills are picking up quite well. Chris was very good at providing essential information such as the steepness of the slope, the width of the slope, and most interestingly, if there were any ‘baskets’ nearby. A "basket" is someone who is all over the place (someone I have to be really careful around).

The link below will take you to a clip of Chris giving me directions. Copy and paste the link, and you will be 100 feet above me and looking through the camera as Chris talks into his walkie-talkie. Essentially, what you will hear is the same as I hear when I am coming down the slope, which acts as my eyes.

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1990960984574865415&hl=en-G#

One of our favourite hangouts in Chamonix was a street-side stall which made fresh waffles with a toffee centre. Chris spotted this place whilst sitting in a café, which quite disappointedly had to stop serving food around 11:00 a.m. This was quite a common feature. Sometimes we would be too early for food, and other times we would be too late.

Although we had no major incidents on the slope, we did get my phantom French girl on the walkie-talkies who would every so often disturb the directions I would get from Chris. "Phantom French girl" refers to someone else using the same walkie-talkie channel as us, which results in Chris cutting out and the random person in my ear. In all cases, in all of my trips to France, the random person has been a French girl!