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Guide to working a ski season By Bom Crisp, Snow EditorSo you wanna do a season... Imagine, you’re standing on top of the world. Nothing can be seen except for the world below covered in huge pillows of soft meringue snow. Not a sound can be heard, no people, no cars, just the noise of your own breath, steaming in the frozen air. Now imagine you can do this again tomorrow and the next day, in fact you can do this for the next five months solid! That’s what doing a season is all about. Here’s how... Getting started So this is it, you’ve decided to do a season; you have enough money saved and a whole year to go before you have get back in the swing of university. But what do you do now? Here’s the cheat’s guide to doing a season. Where you gonna go? Possibly the hardest part after actually committing yourself to a season is deciding upon where to go. This can depend on many factors: the type of riding you’re into, the kind of nightlife you want and how much money you have to spend. If you’re trying to do it on the cheap you’re best to pick a place that already has a town rather than a purpose-built resort; these places tend to be cheaper as real people live in these towns all year round! This is also a great way to meet other seasonnaires as you are all  based around the same community. It is then probably a good idea to decide what type of riding you want to do, freestyle or freeride. If you want freestyle make sure you go somewhere that has a park and pipe. If it’s freeride you prefer, you wanna go somewhere with endless powder fields, steep terrain and, most importantly, open boundaries. There’s nothing worse than getting to a resort on the most ridiculous powder day only to find that all off-piste is out of bounds: Italy’s a nightmare for this - you have been warned. A great way of researching the different mountain areas is to pop into your local holiday company and ask for their winter sports brochure. You should find this includes all you need to know about the various resorts and will also let you know how ‘snowsure’ it is, i.e. guaranteed snow. High altitude and glacier resorts are the best places for this, although if you pick a really high resort be aware that if the weather turns and the clouds roll in there will be little or no visibility, whereas slightly lower resorts with tree lines guarantee some visibility on bad days. Where you gonna live? You have probably heard many nightmare stories about people trying to do seasons and never finding accommodation. Unfortunately this does happen, especially in the more popular resorts. The best way to avoid this is to be prepared and do your research. If you just decide to go and hope for the best, take a sleeping bag just in case you end up kipping on a mate of a mate’s floor for the first week or worse still in your car! Believe me this does happen, I’ve done it. If this does happen, ask round the bars, check the notice-boards and keep your lugholes open! Your best bet is to sort somewhere out before you go, but make sure you give yourself a least two months to do this or they will have already been taken by some other monkey! The easiest way to do this is to ring the tourist office (they all speak English); they can give you a list of various places that are available but it is of course up to you to get on the blower and sort it. Failing that a lot of the companies nowadays actually have some seasonnaire spaces in their chalets, so check these guys out too.  Getting thereSo how you gonna get there? There are only two realistic ways of getting there and both have their pros and cons. If you want to fly, bear in mind that most companies have an excess baggage charge if you go over 25KG, and a board bag usually weighs more than this! But it’s quick and relatively cheap if you use a budget airline. Alternatively, if you have car that will get you that far, you can drive out. This way you can share costs with your buddies, take as much stuff as you can ram into your motor and travel from resort to resort once you get there. A good way to keep costs down when crossing on the ferry is to get a cheap day return ticket, which costs about £30 as opposed to £130 for a normal single. But make sure you have a good cover story, just in case you get stopped. 'I’m going snowboarding for the afternoon and planning to get home by teatime' is not gonna cut it! Car If you have braved the European motorways and driven out for your season, there are a few things you may want to prepare for to make sure you can drive your car home again. Anti-freeze your radiator and squirties! This may sound stupid but you’d be surprised the amount of people that forget and end up flying home. Keep your car free of snow, there’s nothing worse than waking up in the morning on a powder day ready to jump in the car and it has been carted up the road by some burly Frenchman in a snow plough jut because he thought your car was a snowdrift! Or you find a bunch of kids who’ve managed to create the perfect kicker using the bonnet of your car! If in doubt copy the locals... There’s also the question of insurance. Check that your policy has a green card so you can drive legally on foreign roads and that you have sufficient breakdown cover in case of emergencies... if your car’s anything like mine, this is a must. Insurance Finding insurance for a winter season can be quite tough as it’s such a long space of time and the risk of injury is so high. Check out the rest of gapyear.com for good deals on this type of thing. Make sure that before you leave you pick up an E111 from your post office just in case and that before your first day up the hill you acquire a ‘carte neige’ from the tourist office just in case you need to be airlifted down. Carte neige is super-cheap to buy and could end up saving you thousands of pounds in helicopter fees! Click here >> for travel insurance Living with other people A winter season can be tough. It is quite rare, especially in the bigger resorts, to find your own room that has a door you can close behind you for privacy. Most people end up sharing a room with four other people, living and breathing each other’s stench...nice! So, just in case, make sure you get on with the people you plan to live with: it will save on hassles in the long run. Decide on the house rules, maybe you each cook on one night of the week, or it’s your job to keep the bathroom clean...if a rota is made at the very beginning it can’t turn nasty later on in the winter. Also if you or your mates are planning to get lucky it might be a good idea to make a deal that the one who pulls get the double bed for the night...mmm, cosy. You might wanna even start a kitty which goes towards all communal products, such as loo roll and washing-up liquid. Quite often this type of living is what makes a season so fun, but if you don’t think you can live like this, make damn sure that you prepare early. Down-days So it’s raining outside, all the good snow has now been washed away and you can’t even see a foot in front of you let alone the coping in the halfpipe - what you gonna do? Make sure you take some entertainment for when you can’t go riding, I’m sure you can imagine this can happen quite a lot throughout the course of a season and it can get very boring. So it’s probably a good idea to take your MP3 player, some cards or if you drive out a TV, Video and Playstation - they can be a godsend!  EssentialsIf you’re as English as I am you won’t be able to live without a decent cup of tea. You may think ‘I can buy teabags over there’. DON’T! They’re not the same and you need about eight to make a decent brew! You have been warned. Last word So by now you should know what it takes to do a season, it can be tough but hugely rewarding. So get off your arse and go make me proud by having the best six months of your life. Just remember, respect the mountains, don’t drop litter, don’t drop fags or you’ll soon find someone like me caning after you ready to hook you behind the knees, bringing you to the ground before you yell, ‘avalanche’.  Click here >> for instructor courses Click here >> to find ski & chalet work |
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