Protest Blog: Les Marecottes

We went up this small resort, Les Marecottes, close to the city of Martigny today to find some steeper stuff. It was all cloudy at the bottom but some rays of light shone through the low clouds so we crossed our fingers and hopped into the gondola.

Les Marecottes is a really beautiful place with only a couple of lifts but tons of stuff to ride. We saw some amazing big hike-accessed lines, some really steep and scary stuff and smaller lines and pillows. It’s so nice to ride these smaller resorts away from the crowds.

Tero showed us the stuff that he had in mind. We hiked up some spine runs, which was the steepest stuff I've done this year. I was excited, a little scared and filled with adrenalin! On one run I even strapped in with both the nose and tail of my board hanging out in the air with a crazy exposed drop each side.

It was a new kind riding for me this year and the snow wasn’t the best, so I ended up riding some parts of the run on my ass. I wasn't happy after ripping down some beautiful spines but at least my ass still had only one hole in it at the end of the day. That’s always something you have to remember to appreciate.

We have seen so many injuries, bad injuries and close calls amongst our friends this year that you realize that snowboarding is not cross country skiing! I just heard that our friend and team mate Meri got badly hurt in a contest and Finnish Olympian I-E blew out his knee before he even got to Vancouver. Then there is Kevin Pearce, people who even died last week in Austria… so many that it makes you happy to be back in the car in one piece at the end of the day.

The sun sunk behind the peaks pretty fast and we left the rest of the stuff in the shadow to wait for the light again. But we ended up getting some nice shots and experiences. After a crusty run down through the clouds we drove up to Verbier to see the famous apres-ski action there. I ended up seeing lots of Finnish friends and it would have been too easy to ruin the next day so we made our way home pretty early.

By Miikka Hast