Off-piste: Difference between revisions

{{a|metaphor|{{Image|Crud|jpg|Heaven, but with not a blessèd soul, in sight.}} }}The [[JC]] loves skiing. Say what you like about his privileged, stale, pale, male, out-of-touch ass. He has mixed feelings about the “off-piste” metaphor.

Literally, when skiing, it means to ski away from commercial ski-fields — typically, ''miles'' away from them and their lifts, cafés and so on — ski-touring, with skins, avalanche gear, a rucksack and a day’s worth of food, spending more time walking up than skiing down. This is fabulous, of course, but it’s quite a mission, and it has its dangers. The [[JC]] knows good men who went out ski-touring and never came back.

More narrowly, being “off-piste” means skiing ''on'' commercial ski-fields, using normal lifts, but just keeping off the groomed runs, skiing in between them. For dilettantes like the [[JC]], it is a lot less dangerous and a whole lot less of a hassle than back-country ski-touring, and it is ''so'' much better than skiing on the pistes. For every acre of lovingly-gardened snow for ''les gens'' to swish down on their way to that midmorning ''genepis'', three are at least ''three'' are ''au naturale''. They’ll feature trees, ditches, rocks, skanky, crusty snow and, on a good day, plenty of unspoiled powder.  

To be sure, skiing off-piste is no cakewalk: you have to have your wits about you. You have to have a decent game. You have to ''work'' it. You need enough technique to deal with powder, crud, moguls, avoid trees and whatnot. This is technique that 90% of skiers don’t have, so they stick to the pistes. But one of the worst things about skiing is people getting in your way. It sucks. And it’s dangerous.

So, some maths: if only a quarter of the skiable area is pisted then there is ''three times'' as much unpisted skiing on a given hill. If 90% of skiers are on a piste at any time — I have no data but I reckon both these are conservative — then by my feeble calculation there are ''twenty-seven times'' as many skiers per hundred square yards ''on'' the piste as there are ''off'' it. That is reason enough to learn to ski crud. Plus, pistes tend to be icy in the mornings and get rucked up, mogulled, sludgy ''and'' icy when everyone has been drilling them all day.