I was lucky enough to be back in Kandersteg again for two weeks to help out for Ski Week 1, one of the busiest weeks in the Winter season. I was helping out as a Ski Guide taking guests around the slopes and helping them a bit with their skiing. Being back at KISC was amazing... I loved every second of being back, especially seeing my friends from the summer.
So the deal is that I worked for a week, then had a week's free stay (which is a pretty epic deal if you ask me). Part of this was working running the evening activities - I got to do curling! Which was great because I've always wanted to have a go. It turns out that curling is really difficult - getting the stone even near to the circle was hard. Here's a couple of photos of me having a go.
But the main part of what I was doing was Ski Guiding which basically involves taking a group around, showing them where to go and giving them a few tips on skiing. The group I was guiding (45th Woolwich) was total beginners, having never skied before, and though they had lessons on the first few days my job was pretty interesting... It was actually really good fun remembering all the lessons and tips I was taught when I was learning (which was quite a long time ago), plus they were a really nice bunch of people. By the end of the week we (I was guiding with Caz) managed to get all of them skiing on the blue slope and a few of them on some pretty hardcore reds. One of the kids was even starting to parallel ski, which is incredible for five days of skiing. I've got a few photo's of them at the top of Lauchernalp ski area.
After my week in green (we don't get to wear pink) we had a week to do whatever we wanted... So I did some more skiing :-) These are from the (pretty small) area above Kandersteg (near to Oeschinensee). The day when it was sunny we were teaching Christine, another one of the helpers, to ski for the first time - she's the one on the ground...
Another one of my days we went to do the Gemmi Hike and Sled which, as the name suggests, involves a bunch of hiking and sledging. We hiked up to the top of the Gemmi valley, past the frozen lake of Daubensee, where we could see down into Leukerbad. But the sledging back down was much more fun...
Another one of my days we went to do the Gemmi Hike and Sled which, as the name suggests, involves a bunch of hiking and sledging. We hiked up to the top of the Gemmi valley, past the frozen lake of Daubensee, where we could see down into Leukerbad. But the sledging back down was much more fun...
One of the things I've always wanted to try is cross country skiing, which most of the Nordics (apparently it's a compulsory sport in Finnish schools) found pretty strange. It's actually quite good fun, but I can see how it would get boring after an hour or two. It's also a pretty good workout especially on the arms which surprised me a bit...
So all in all it was a pretty good trip, definitely something I want to do again next year. I'm also going to apply for Snow and Ice this summer in the next couple of weeks, so hopefully I'll be back again this summer. Yep, definitely caught the KISC bug :-)
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