Snowboarding in Anzére, Switzerland, February 2006
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I’m writing this blog entry in the departure lounge of Milan airport. My flight home has been delayed for three hours due to an electrical fault with the plane. Still, I have an electrical outlet and my laptop so I’m pretty happy :-)
I’m on my way back from Switzerland where I was attending the MINEMA Winter School, which this year was being hosted by the University of Lausanne in the ski resort of Anzére. MINEMA was great. Each day there are six hours of lectures from experts in the field of mobile middleware and, as Lancaster is a partner institution, all of my travel and hotel costs are covered by the European Science Foundation. On my way out, I flew to Milan and from there caught a train across the Swiss border to Sion and wound my way up into the mountains by bus. Anzere is a pretty but quiet little resort set at 1500M with the top lifts rising to a little over 2500M. It hosts mostly families, though it’ll no doubt expand when they complete the new link to Cranz Montana.
I was up bright and early on Monday for the conference which has lectures running from 8AM – 12PM, followed by a break until 4PM and more lectures until 7:30PM. This meant that I could snowboard every afternoon, but the 8AM start combined with our night-time activities (right-most photo above) made the early start pretty hard work! The resort looked pretty bare from what I could see as I arrived, however, it started to snow heavily on Sunday night and by Monday afternoon it had dumped a foot or so of powder. The snow didn’t stop for the next few days and by Wednesday it must have put down close to a meter of powder.
Despite the great conditions, Monday’s snowboarding was a bit of a washout for me – my glasses kept steaming up and I made the mistake of putting them in my pocket – after which I lost them and couldn’t see! Also, the only run open was a long black due to the high avalanche risk, which left my legs pretty tired by the end of the day. On Tuesday I couldn’t get out as I was busy doing a remote demonstration of our flooding work for some visitors at Lancaster. Wednesday was much better though and I spent the day with Ben and Francois exploring the resort and enjoying the great off-piste conditions. Thursday was even better, the snow clouds finally cleared and Ben and I spent the whole day blasting through the often untracked powder. It was interesting being out with someone so much better than me. Ben was doing 360’s off every jump and even managed a 20ft drop off a cliff into the deep powder. I didn’t quite get to that level but he did persuade me to try a few little jumps – I might even post some videos.
I need more conferences like this one!