Snow? In Yorkshire?! OK then. The Facewest team have been revelling in the last week’s snowfall and getting out skiing (and running and biking) in the cold white stuff.
The sun showed itself on Tuesday afternoon and a swift decision was taken to head to the Dales – fortunately all the skiers in the office either live close enough to nip home for kit, or, in my case, handily already had it in my car! We piled into Jake’s van and headed north on the search for snow. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be quite as much around the Kettlewell area as there is in Guiseley, but we spied some potential lines above Hawkswick and skinned up on to the fell to give them a go.
The snow was pretty crusty and windblown, with probably 30cm in some places, and none in others. Picking a line down the best bits worked OK, and Jake showed us how it was done while Kevin and I worked our way down a little more clumsily behind. In our defence, he’s already had a week’s skiing this year – nothing to do with skill, right?! Even the worst snow is better than a day behind the computer and we had a lovely afternoon in the sun.
In other news, skiing has been had even closer to home – Jake, Amy and Sam have been out cross-country skiing (or running in Sam’s case) on the Chevin. Amy’s first ski experience was had around the Facewest car park, and I don’t think she even fell over!
I kicked off the Yorkshire ski season with an extreme ski ascent of the north face of Round Hill last weekend, fat rockered powder skis highly recommended for floating above metre high heather… I’ve also had some more successful attempts at backyard skiing by headlamp on Baildon Moor, with some surprisingly good powder up there, ‘almost’ knee deep in places! Avoiding digging your ski tips into the underlying bracken proves fairly difficult, resulting in plenty of comedy moments.
Meanwhile Graham has been forgoing it all and spent a long weekend in Marrakech soaking up the culture, tea and city craziness.