It’s 4pm after a full and hard day’s skiing. The lifts are closing, the sky is darkening gunmetal grey, the wind is whipping, and we are still a long way from home. But that is far from the worst news. My “safe space” route back to the tea and lemon drizzle cake I know is waiting at the chalet is the benign Blue 55, better known as Happy Valley. I hoped I could descend on autopilot, but it is shut after an avalanche. And that only means one thing: we are taking Black 52.
It is not the steepest run I have ever descended, nor the most heavily mogulled. But it is plenty precipitous enough, narrows like a funnel at the bottom, and on this day littered with tired end of day skiers like me, clumsily navigating decaying wet snow — the dreaded porridge.
