Rum weather and no mistake. I looked out of the window before going to bed last night and the sky was clear. I was awoken by the Fernie alarm clock: the explosions set off on the mountain to trigger mini avalanches and thus make it safe to ski. Always a good sound. Sure enough when I looked out of the window the snow was covering everything. We must have had about 4 inches over night :)

Snow brings the people to the hill and there were some actual serious queues today, with everyone eager to be first up and get first tracks. I found some great powder just off the Bear chair lift and skiied all the way through until lessons started, foregoing my usual morning breather and coffee. Wow - I'm so hardcore all of a sudden!

Unfortunately its been really warm this week from about 11am onwards (above 0!!) and the precip. soon started to fall as rain lower down. This made the conditions far from ideal - the snow gets really heavy and its really hard work to do anything. Higher up things were better but it was strange riding the Timber chair up: rain at the bottom, then hail, then sleet and finally snow at the top.

Lessons this week have been more focussed on teaching techniques. In itself its been quite interesting but also frustrating. We spent one whole day on the nursery slopes learning to teach snowplough turns when we could have been tearing around in the new snow! I'm also finding it really hard to analyse other skiers. We have to practice on ourselves but as were are all at roughly the same standard when you spot an error or something you've got no idea what to do about it as chances are you do it too. But I guess we will learn more about that next week.

This weekend I'm off on a daytrip to the good ol' US of A. We are heading down to Big Mountain, Montana on Saturday. So stay tuned and I'll tell you all about it...