This video is about skiing in Breckenridge during our vacation at New Year 2003-4.
We had been skiing in Breckenridge since the early 90s. Once our boys Harry & Tom discovered firstly Whistler, and then Breckenridge, we couldn’t persuade them to go back to skiing in Europe as we had for many years!
On our first trip there we met Dutch van Andel, our ski instructor, and spent many happy days out with him, a most effective way of taking ski lessons over a day as a family instead of individual or on large groups – a happy medium!
Dutch and his sons, Hayden and Gerhard, became firm friends of ours, and more recently, when Dutch had moved back to the Netherlands and we had resumed skiing in Europe, we had a great ski trip together in Bormio (a feature video yet to come!)
Meanwhile, here is a video taken by the ski school on one of our days out with Dutch, when he took us to the Nastar slalom course as part of our – erm – training!
Here is another video taken by the ski school on one of our days out with Dutch, at New Year 2005, with a colleague, Mike, from the ski school, following us and catching the magic moments!
In January 2008, we spent a week skiing in Courmayeur, a smaller Italian resort, following Zermatt the year before and St Anton the year after. Courmayeur lost nothing by comparison, and as you will see below, we enjoyed the wonderful snow conditions and varied terrain, including off-piste and tree skiing, enormously.
The first video is about a day at Courmayeur, 15th Jan 2008, when fresh overnight snow left several runs in beautiful condition for deep snow skiing. Here are Harry and Tom, and their poor old cameraman, trying their hand at several of them.
Lunch at Maison Vieille was a real treat, the best of the mountain restaurants, and we went there a few times during the week. Amazingly there was no queuing for lunch, although it was busy enough, and we couldn’t wait to go back.
This is not the largest resort we have been to by any means, but in our time there, in January, there were so many excellent runs in wonderful snow conditions, and good weather nearly all of the time. We would go back there like a shot – but there are so many European resorts we want to revisit after so may years skiing in Breckenridge, Colorado.
While the boys were young, they wouldn’t let us ski anywhere else owing to the familiar food and language in the US, and of course we had wonderful times with our instructor, Dutch van Andel, and his two boys, Hayden and Gerhard, who all became firm friends, and hosted us for Christmases as well! Dutch joined us in Bormio, in 2014, on one of our more recent European expeditions. More of that in another post…
Early off-piste in fresh snow in Courmayeur
A second day of equally lovely snow conditions! Harry and I were the early starters, but we soon called Tom up the mountain to enjoy the wonderful snow conditions.
The next day, Harry and I get out early, and call Tom up to the spectacular conditions
The next day, 17th January, we went off-piste skiing again in Courmayeur, when more fresh overnight snow left several runs in beautiful condition for deep snow skiing. We decided to use the Mont Blanc guides, to help us find some new runs and some tree skiing. It was quite difficult here and there, as you will see!
All of us, Ann, Harry and Tom and I spent the day with Enrico Bonino, of Mont Blanc Guides (and an experienced climber) and it was quite an education!
Some more difficult off-piste skiing, with Enrico Bonino, including in the trees