In my ski-training journey, going off-piste takes me out of my comfort zone

In my ski-training journey, going off-piste takes me out of my comfort zone,Going off-piste was a category shift in my training experience. At times it felt like I was no further along than at the start, but in some moments it felt like I was making vast advances

In my ski-training journey, going off-piste takes me out of my comfort zone

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More from this series • A journalist returns to the mountains after a near-death ski experience

The first time we ventured off the beaten track – or, more precisely, away from the highly artificial creation that is the prepared ski run, where natural snow is sometimes cut with an artificial version and beaten into submission by machines – we were still some way from a truly wild mountain environment.

It was a week or so into my training, a week into my project to reacquaint myself with the proper techniques of ski mountaineering after I nearly died attempting that activity in Russia in 2017. My instructor and I were close by Le Tsapé, a restaurant at 2,580 metres above Chandolin, the small high-altitude Swiss village where I am staying. (In the past, these Alpine valleys effectively had their own private languages, and the name of the location – with its telling “ts” sound – is one of the patois sounds that lingers on in place names even though standard French has almost entirely replaced the hyper-local argot.)

My first off-piste experience was a gentle, pillow-shaped slope adjacent to the groomed beginner’s area. Christophe Hagin, the head of the Chandolin ski school, asked to see how I approached it. I was intimidated, despite the lowly incline. I did not really know what to do with my legs, and I was immediately out of my comfort zone.

There was a deeper vein to my intimidation. It’s important to be as honest as possible about my feelings about going back after my close brush with death six years ago. When Christophe and I sat at the top of that gentle virgin slope, it would be wrong – a writerly overstatement of the kind I deplore – to say I was quaking. I was not. After Russia I did not ski for a year, but I carefully got back to it the winter after that. Indeed, the first time I skied again was to shadow the ski portion of the entrance exam for the French mountain guides training programme for a magazine assignment in 2019. I remember then definitely feeling like I was getting on a horse that had thrown me. But I remounted.

Even before the start of this project I could ski – not necessarily in grand style, but still reasonably safely and in control – most anything a resort could throw at me, within bounds. But off-piste was a category shift. I had spent considerable time there, but mainly on ski tours. The conditions – rucksack on back, difficult lightweight skis, exhaustion – did not help, but the real flaw was technique-driven. The result was often disaster. Fall after fall, each time harder to get up than before, with snow in entering where it should not – in gloves, inside jackets and goggles. Eventually, in the past, my off-piste “skiing” often meant a survival descent rammed against the rear of the boots. I knew the principles – skis tighter together for fresh snow, a bouncing motion. But principle is not practice.

Going off-piste again this year, I did not feel terror. It would be more accurate to say I experienced a nagging sense that this is an environment where bad things can happen, and beyond that, a blunt recognition that, as with the basics of on-piste skiing, there is just so much to learn. To be in this environment safely requires knowledge that I still lack. But I am learning.

It is an enduring irony of ski touring that much of the risk – notably avalanche – occurs in environments that do not seem to portend danger: appealing slopes of 35-45 degrees, bluebird days after snowfall. Ski touring risk is not like rock climbing, where steepness and exposure generate a sense of hazard that is sometimes above what is actually present, in particular on “sport” routes where bolts drilled into the rock provide firm anchor points.

The way through these technical and emotional impasses was a gentle, graded approach. From that beginner off-piste, parallel to the groomed beginner slopes, Hagin and I moved to another section of ungroomed ground that runs parallel to a blue run on the Illhorn, the principal summit above the village. The ground was open meadow, then wooded. The new snow from early January was soon tracked out, but this area was just right to keep me at the edge of my comfort zone. And rather than short pitches, Christophe soon had me follow him as we covered longer stretches, until my thighs burned.

If the psychology of entry into the wilder environment was nuanced, so too was the sensation of progress. At times it felt like I was making vast advances. Above the lower Illhorn slopes, the upper flanks of the same mountain are laced with metal girders to prevent avalanches menacing the village. Here, when there was still deep fresh snow to be found, we cut by these surreal barriers and I experienced that cherished floating feeling. It was something that I knew I could not do before this year, and I was thrilled.

On other occasions, when I was tired, or I had fallen, or the skis just would not behave, it felt like I was no further along than at the start. I suspect this is normal to any process of learning, in particular when motor functions are involved and the brain has to integrate a huge amount of information. The conscious and unconscious mind and muscle memory make a complicated interaction. It takes time. I imagine that this stop-start feeling is subject-matter agnostic too. We were engaged in off-piste skiing; it could have been tai-chi.

The indication, though, that there was progress overall was a section behind the Col des Ombrintzes between Chandolin and St. Luc, close to where the local freeride competition takes place each March. The steep slope receives little sun, so the snow stays fresher, and while it was marked and secured, it was not groomed. The first time I skied this ground, it seemed frightening. Then, gradually, it became the highlight of the day, a place I crept back to after class, as though it were a magnet and I an iron filing. As I write this I am coming to the end of my time in Chandolin. But this weekend I move up the valley to Zinal, and fortunately that area is renowned within Switzerland for its freeride terrain. With luck, progress will continue.

Simon Akam is a British journalist and author. His first book, The Changing of the Guard – The British Army since 9/11, published in 2021, was a Times Literary Supplement book of the year and won the Templer First Book Prize. Simon can be found at @simonakam on Twitter, @simon.akam on Instagram.