1) Escape The Rat Race
Have you ever felt like you are just going through the motions of life? Every day is the same, same people, same job, the same journey to work, same lunch, same chat… kind of like Ground Hog Day?! In fact, you feel like you might just go a little crazy if you don’t do something to mix things up a bit?! You feel a one week holiday in Spain just won’t suffice at this point, you need to do something REALLY different, maybe something to take you out of your comfort zone. Well, have you ever considered a snowboard season?
You might have heard people talking about them, or you might have even seen Chalet Girl (cliche but gives you an idea of what its all about). You basically go and live/ work in a mountain resort for 6 months during the winter, normally in Europe but you can go further afield too. You enter into this little mountain bubble full of snow, apres, skiing/ snowboarding, parties, gossip, sun and banter and become totally unaware of the world existing outside of the mountain bubble. In my eyes, it gives you the perfect break from your life back in the UK, and a totally new experience to break the cycle of the mundane 9-5. Actually, you may not even want to come back to your “normal” life afterwards. If you are worried about having the money for said “ski season”, don’t worry! Doing a snowboard season is a cheap way to travel. If you get the right job in the mountains, it can come with accommodation, equipment hire, food/ drink (including wine), travel and a ready-made group of friends AND get paid a wage. It’s an EASY ready-made way to set up a new life for a bit.
2) Explore New Places
Travelling is all about exploring new places, venturing into the unknown. Most would immediately think of backpacking around hot, sunny places, people don’t consider the snowy ones so much. Same with holidays, I feel that a lot of people, if they have an opportunity to go on holiday, they would automatically go for a summer holiday. It wouldn’t even cross your mind to go somewhere cold. So maybe this is why the mountains are an even more exciting destination to pick for travel, they are unusual and less explored. Its hard to make that choice, cold over hot, but if you do, I promise you won’t regret it. You might even end of picking snowy over sunny every time after that too! You just have to take that first plunge. Going to a new destination gives you a chance to investigate a totally new culture and landscape: the spectacular mountain ranges, the little log cabins on the side of the hill, the sporty ski/snowboard culture/ the apres culture (!), the mountain way of life, the locals, the mountain markets, other winter sports (eg, ice diving)… so different to your average beach holiday of pool/ beach/ cocktails (lush as well obviously, just nice to do something out of the norm).
3) Avoid The British Winter
I love British Summertime. Lazy days in the countryside, BBQs on the beach, garden parties, cream teas, Sunday walks, light evenings….there’s just a really nice vibe to the UK during those months. And I LOVE winter…..but not so much winter in the UK. As soon as September hits, I start to get those sinking feelings as the gloomy British winter is on its way. I spent over 10 years escaping winter in the UK and spending it in the mountains instead. It’s only the last couple of years that I have spent my winters back in England. And I had totally forgotten how depressing they can be. Especially those months after Christmas and before the spring. Christmas keeps spirits uplifted for a while, but as soon as that’s over, life seems very wet, grey and miserable. Somehow spending winter in a place that has PROPER winter (eg, cold, snow, mountains) seems way more bearable, awesome in fact. I have always thought, if it has to be winter, it might as well be hardcore winter, not half-hearted rainy winter. So the answer for me is to seek somewhere snowy to spend those months, then head back to the UK just in time for spring and where the country is more optimistic again! A ski season is a great solution.
4) Winter Sun
Now following on from my last point, many people believe that in the mountains and snowy winter places, there is no sun. Quite the opposite. I have had my best suntan EVER from doing a ski season. Yes, granted it was only half of my face with a huge massive goggle tan, but still, I was unrecognisable from my usual fair self. The mountain climate is much like the weather anywhere, you have bad days and good days but its way more extreme. When its cold its very cold and snowy, and when it’s BEAUTIFUL. It’s weird, it’s sunny but its still cold, but a nice cold, crisp, fresh cold but still warm on your skin. And its something about the sun reflecting off all that nice white snow that gives you an amazing tan, so don’t forget suncream! You always see people sunbathing in the snow too…in deck chairs…sometimes in bikinis!! Looks odd at first, but quite the thing to do after a long day on the mountain. You can get very warm snowboarding sometimes in all your layers, so it’s nice to strip off (not totally…) and enjoy a cold beer and some sun. Then when the spring hits the mountains, it can get hot, like really hot! The snow is still there but its slushy and wet, so it’s more about enjoying the sun and chilling out after a busy season. This is a good time to tan that pasty body that has been covered up for months.
5) Friends for Life
I’ve previously mentioned the mountain bubble that you exist in for 6 months, yes it’s only a short period of time in the grand scheme of things, but you will find you become REALLY close to people really quickly and form friendships that can last a lifetime. You’re thrown into this new way of life with a bunch of strangers: you work together, live together, ride together, party together…basically do everything together for 6 whole months. So friendships in the “outside” world that would normally form gradually over a longer period of time, are fast-forwarded x10. They see you at your best and they see you at your worst (dragging you home on a sledge through the snow after a party). There is something about actually snowboarding together that brings people closer together too. Especially the learning stage if you go through it with others, you bond over your trial and tribulations that conquering a new sport involves. When you get a bit better and hit the big mountain, you will face situations that you need to rely on one another. For example: digging each other out of the powder when you get stuck in all that lovely fresh snow, giving each other tips how to do tricks on the park, following each other carefully in a whiteout, trusting others to help you venture off-piste safely, fun races down the mountain with friends. Not to mention all the countless chairlift rides you will take together, hours of chatting and getting to know each other right there. There is just such a camaraderie in the mountain bubble that for me hasn’t been matched yet anywhere else. And you have to think, all these new people MUST be like-minded to you to be there in the first place, common ground immediately. You won’t be able to keep in touch with absolutely everyone from your season, but you will with the ones that matter. They will be around for life and guarantee you will look back on your first season years later and fondly reminisce over all the funny stories and antics you got up to.
6) Meet The Girl/ Guy Of Your Dreams
So I actually met my husband within the first week of my first season…..after firmly saying to everyone before I left home that “I wasn’t going to get attached”….little did I know. We clapped eyes on each other outside the Red Lion in Tignes, I was wearing furry baby blue boots and a white fluffy coat (first season clothing attire wasn’t that great…the word chav springs to mind). He was severely hungover and hadn’t washed his hair in 6 months. But it was love and the rest is history. 13 years later we are married with 2 kids! You just never know whats around the next corner. Similar to the friendship forming thing in the mountains, I feel like the “falling in love” thing is way more intensified. You end up seeing a lot of each other really quickly and things move at a much faster pace. None of this taking it steady and having a couple dates malarky. By the end of the 6 month season, it honestly feels that you have been together for well over a year. Again, you become closer and you bond over the sport of snowboarding, helping each other out and being there on the mountain for one another. Snowboarding in the “honeymoon period” is actually brilliant as there are no arguments. Existing in the mountain bubble for 6 months is like living in a fairy tale, and I think that helps “new love” form easily on a ski season. Not to mention being in the snow is romantic anyway. Plus if you like snowboarding and the mountain lifestyle, chances are you’ll be drawn to a partner that likes the same. Match made in heaven.
7) A New Hobby
Now I must talk about the actual snowboarding, as that’s what its all about really! It feels amazing to learn something new, especially to start from nothing and build it up slowly until you are tearing up the mountain. It feels like you have achieved something and that gives you such a good self-esteem boost. There is always more to learn with snowboarding, as soon as you have achieved one goal, there is something else that you want to learn. Snowboarding is a different type of hobby too, it’s not like something you pick up in the UK, that you go to a club once a week. Its a lifestyle, an all-encompassing all immersing hobby. It becomes your whole existence for the 6 months you are there. Everything ultimately revolves around snowboarding and how to do as much of it as possible. And obviously, if you become completely hooked like me, you can just carry on doing back-to-back seasons for years, never seeing summer at all! If you have never snowboarded before, you might have loads of untapped potential?! You could be a totally natural and destined for the Olympics and not even know about it! Plus doing a whole season of snowboarding means that you will get good really quickly. It’s not like doing a weeks holiday, where you feel you have “got it” by the end, but then you have to go back a square one when you start your weeks holiday the next year. A season will give you more consistency. I think its great to have a focus on a hobby too, something you are passionate about and something to keep your mind and body active and out of trouble!
8) Fitness
Snowboarding is not only good for your mind but its good for your body too. Its such a healthy sport and way of life to be involved with. All that fresh air and exercise, the vitamin D, the stamina you build up and the muscles……your thighs and bum will never look so good. So when you do head back to the UK after a season, you will be beach body ready already! To me, the best kind of firmness is something that doesn’t make you feel like you are “trying” to get fit (ie. the gym, running. swimming etc). It’s doing something you REALLY enjoy and getting fit along the way is a bonus. At the start of the season, especially if you are learning to snowboard/ ski, your whole body will feel like it’s been run over by a double-decker bus, twice. You’ll probably find yourself exhausted after each day, to the point that you don’t know if you can carry on. By the end of a season, you will feel like snowboarding all day doesn’t even break a sweat. you could go on for hours. It’s amazing how quickly your firmness builds up. And when you feel fit, you feel happier mentally too. Another positive thing is the altitude. The high altitude is perhaps why you are so exhausted at the start of the season whilst your body tries to adjust, but the time you go home and back down to sea level, you will feel so healthy and great. All that snowboarding in the altitude will make you feel super doper fit. You will run circles around all your friends that have been stuck in the UK for winter eating pies! This is why athletes train at altitude. If its good enough for Linford Christie its good enough for me!
9) Grow as a person
This sounds mega cheesy and very cliche…but you really do grow as a person. You discover stuff about yourself you maybe didn’t know before: like how much you LOVE snowboarding or how much of a daredevil you actually are (you might surprise yourself). I felt like a changed a lot after my first season: I became more confident, more outgoing, more adaptable, even less sensible, realised how little sleep I needed, how resourceful I could be (fancy dress out of bin bags and pillowcase, washing clothes with shampoo etc) and realised how much I loved the mountains. You can often be put in small accommodation with lots of people, this can teach you how to be tolerant of others and introduce you to lots of different characters that maybe you would never have got a chance to meet otherwise. You might completely fall in love with the snowboarding way of life and the mountains and finally feel you have had a purpose in life?! You might not have ever realised what your body was truly capable of with all those tricks you now perfected in the terrain park!? You most definitely learn how to live on basically no money and not many materialistic things and that you will actually be fine! You learn that happiness is the most important thing and that there is life outside the 9-5 UK rat race.
10) Memories
The BEST thing about doing a season is all of the memories you come away with, random experiences that you cant replicate (or get away with) anywhere else. These are great to reminisce about and always bring a smile to your face. Season memories can be things like…..waking up with a 8 foot plastic penguin that you have stolen from the nursery slope, stealing a dog and using a scarf to take it for walks (not actually me), mixing chalet red and white wine together to make Rose (???), taking naps in guest beds when your supposed to be cleaning their rooms (plus maybe trying on some of their clothes), trying to drink Chartreuse through your nose as it apparently “gets into your bloodstream quicker”, puking off chairlifts onto peoples heads, walking down the mountain in your socks because anything was better than snowboarding at that point in time (true story), wetting yourself on the mountain because you fell over so hard you just couldn’t keep it in…….this is the stuff that dreams are made of!!! These are things you will remember for the rest of your life. NB. please note that not all of these stories are mine (hmmm) and the best stories have had to be censored.
