Saturday 6 March 2010.-.2 55 am
Courmayeur: Rediscover the Gems
~ Jorn:
While heliskiing in Turkey was an extreme and personal experience, my getaway with family to Courmayeur presented a much coveted low key mountain lifestyle in the winter. This great resort has a sophisticated ambiance. Town strolling, relaxation, lively après ski, local cuisine and wine, etc, can all be enjoyed in this friendly and genuine place for skiing.
You’ll meet local Italians who are visiting the place – or their second homes – and enjoying local delicious food accompanied by a glass of wine made from the Nebbiolo grape.
The town is more charming than one would expect at first sight. Via Roma is where Courmayeur is centred around. It is probably the finest main street of any ski resort in Europe, filled with restaurants and a good collection of nice shops, such as Malo, and several Monclers.
The entire ski area can be covered in one day. Rocce Bianco and two others are the only black marked runs. If you want proper skiing, head outside the main area. On snowy days it is like Megeve in that it is empty on the pistes. I had great tree skiing in Val Veny after a snowfall.
Want a change of scene? Chamonix is only a 30-minute drive away. Need local knowledge? Get in touch with Alessandro Mezzavilla, who knows all about the area. Since Verbier in January, I’ve been skiing with my Blackcrows ski Orb 179. It’s a beautiful pair of skis for all kinds of aggressive skiing.
I have rediscovered Courmayeur from this trip and some real gems.
While skiing in the Val Veny valley, we stopped for lunch at La Grolla. It is a nice log cabin serving pasta, corneloni and mostly Italians, offering fantastic views of the glacier and Mont Blanc with seating outside in the sun.
Vineria Valset is a perfect little wine bar just at the beginning of Via Roma. A very pleasant place for a quiet après ski or before dinner drink. Then again there are about ten small bars and vineries in the same stretch for you to choose from.
Via Roma is not short of good restaurants either. Cadran Solaire Restaurant and Bar is a classically styled place, almost like a living room, with plenty of space between tables. It is remarkably well priced, serving really good modern Italian.
There are also excellent places outside the main town. Chateau Branlant is located a little below Chiecco on Plan Checruit. When you arrive in the house, which is made of stone and wood, you will be greeted by small plates of antipasta. Delicious menu (pasta, meat etc) and a wine list with wines from Valdostana and Piedmont. Soups and salads are highly recommended. Wonderful homemade (from the valley) Grappa Villa Novocento – all in all a fantastic hotel and restaurant.
We also took a beautiful drive up to Val Ferret, where you can find La Clotze. The restaurant is quiet Italian with local specialities as well as more traditional north Italian dishes. They have a detailed wine book. The decor is not very mountain like. There is also a table inside the wine room.
There are several more new finds I highly recommend. Along with the above, they will be added to our
Ski Guide iPhone app and the online guide on
SQUA.RE in the coming weeks as my latest update.
Saturday 27 February 2010.-.7 04 pm
Oktopus Tattoo: A Quick Tour Through The Lab
~ Morten:
Who is this mysterious lady? You may not know this, but our Special Project is the inspiration for her being. If you haven’t seen her from some of our brand materials, you soon will. And a story involving this lady will unfold.
Back to the special project, our Oktopus Tattoo. It is hard to believe 2 years has passed since we first discussed developing a diver’s watch and its design conception.
In a normal design process, one would use hand or computer drawings to get as close to the ideal and final design as possible before building a prototype. Anyone with the knowledge of product development would know that building commercial prototypes is a costly exercise, so you don’t want to have to build too many of them before production.
But the complexity of the tattoo patterns meant it was practically impossible to realise the case design for the Tattoo watch in sketches. We had no choice but to start using 3D modelling from a very early stage for the mock-ups to see how the 2-dimensional tattoo patterns on paper would flow well on the various facets of a 3-dimensional Oktopus watch case. We painstakingly went through numerous SLA (3D-layering) prototypes and engraved countless aluminium blocks just to develop the case design.
To create an original design, we give thoughts to everything. During the Product Development phase, all design is done in house (in The Lab!)…down to the smallest detail of the numeric font on the Oktopus dial. Every time we come up with an idea or adjust a design, we need to validate its feasibility with watch-makers and part-producers in Switzerland before we carry on further.
[Continue to Part II...]
Saturday 27 February 2010.-.6 28 pm
Oktopus Tattoo: A Quick Tour Through The Lab (Part II)
[Continued from Part I]
Housing a movement within such a small space of the watch case requires much technical study. Although it helps to use modern technology and computer design tools to simulate the possible results, a lot of fine-tuning needs to be done on the physical pieces.
For example, on the F. Piquet movement, we give 80% of the weight of the hands to the second hand as a counterweight. Just 1/10 of a gram’s difference would shift the weight and tip the balance, and the watch would not work properly. When you are producing limited editions like us, and not mass producing thousands or millions of pieces, you don’t get a standard cookie-cutting finish for all pieces of a small part. Which means, no computer can simulate the end result and we test every step by assembling physical pieces.
This is a long process to the final prototype. More often than not, I review the design constantly till the last minute to push for the best possible outcome to show you at BaselWorld.
So, we are definitely not seeing the finished designs for our novelties until BaselWorld, which is 3 weeks away, starting 18th March. But I should have more to show you here in two weeks time.
Sunday 21 February 2010.-.11 16 pm
Heli-skiing in Turkey
~ Jorn:
What a unique experience! Last Saturday I flew from London to Trabzon via Istanbul. It was slightly unnerving being the minority, surrounded by people who didn't speak any European language and looked very different. Old women dressed in traditional shawls and dresses, men with large moustaches and serious faces.
I felt more at ease as we landed and were greeted by the rep from the Verbier-based
Turkey Heliski SA. They put us up at Otel Hasimoglu, located in a small mountain village called Ayder. The area is a national park but the town is for tourists and the locals don't ski. Houses are made of stone and wood - most of which being summerhouses for people from the larger cities in Turkey. The inside of the hotel is traditional Turkish with good local food aplenty.
Each morning, we would start the day with an extensive breakfast buffet serving all kinds of Turkish delicacies - fresh and dried fruit, local honey, eggs of every kind, bread, cheese, olives..... And freshly squeezed local orange juice. We would be off to get ready for the first lift at 8.30 just outside the hotel. Except for the first day when we spent half an hour to go through the obligatory safety information (which makes you not want to go skiing, especially not with a helicopter!). The guide team was professional and with new helicopters brought here every season from Switzerland. They only have heli ski here for 10 weeks per season.
We would have four to six lifts each morning/afternoon skiing approximately 4,500 vertical meters. The snow was so deep that it was hard to get any speed and turn when we first started. It literally was about leaning back and surfing. All you can think about is "do not fall in this snow". Because of the depth of the new snow it is very difficult and tiring to get up again; it may also be a little dangerous as you do run the risk of disappearing under the snow and not being able to orientate or breathe. At most times when you are on a peak you can see the Black Sea in the background - pretty awesome.
When the snow had condensed, the skiing was much better, which also reduced avalanche danger. At least our skis would bounce back from the snow. It wasn't particularly cold which is always good. The temperature there is normally just around zero and it is rarely extremely cold. On the 2,800 meter peaks we have had down to -6 degrees. A reason for this is that the proximity of the Black Sea acts as a regulator.
After a day’s skiing, a massage was in order. They do a very good deep massage there, which is very good for your back and tired legs. Dinner was a sumptuous affair where the Grand Chef donning a white hat carved the turkey (yes turkey) in front of us. It was baked in grapes leaves and salt crust. Very tasty and succulent. Plus a large Turkish mezze buffet, with cakes and fruit for desert, all very good.
Everyday the guides would make snow test by digging out the various layers and checking the stability and other things of the snow. Habitually I would check the barometer on The Rock (our ski instrument) every morning which would suggest the weather conditions for the day. The readings corresponded to the forecast we received. Our guides got fairly interested by what The Rock could do and tried it out. A lot of the functionality is relevant to heli skiing, and especially in areas where the mountains and their behaviour are so unknown. Altitude, total vertical meters skied, number and history of runs, temperature, freeze level and temperature changes, barometer for changes in weather, inclination for testing of slopes, compass for orientation of slopes.
On day 3, having done six lifts and 3770 meters of vertical skiing, the barometer went down which suggested a storm coming in hopefully bringing snow. The freeze level (2200 meters) had also gone up slightly, meaning that we would have to ski higher up. We finished the day before a 30 knot wind called because having wind alone does not help the skiing conditions.
We decided to take pictures of the local places and people so we ventured to the nearest village (Camlihemsin) from Ayder which in a European context certainly is authentic. It mainly consisted of one through road with a lot of small shops selling tea pots, carpentry, steaming cows meat, fruit and vegetables. We photographed the men who on a Monday afternoon played cards, drank tea and smoked cigarettes in the local tea houses. For religious and cultural reasons there are no bars, pubs or anything like that. After that we drove up to a small deserted village in the mountains where the houses are more than 300 years old. In the house at the farthest end of the path, the only ones living there were an old couple. We were invited in for tea in the only room heated. It was heated with wood as electricity or any other energy source is apparently unreliable up there. One of the nick-nacks on the wall was a magnum German schaumwein from 1873 (before Kaiser Wilhelm was born!). This is also skiing in Turkey for you.
Day 4, I woke up at 7:15 and looked at The Rock - pressure slightly up at 873 and looking out I could see blue sky with fast-moving white clouds. And, what a day! It had to rate among the top three heli skiing days in my life. Perfect snow (not a snow flake in the wrong place) blue sky, a few degrees below zero. In the morning before lunch we had done ten lifts skiing more than 6,000 meters vertical. After a lunch by the helicopter in the sun we skied another 5,000 meters totalling 11,000 meters vertical skiing all in immaculate powder, knee and some times thigh deep. All of our skiing was on north facing 30 - 40 degrees faces with no crust, no rocks, sometimes trees - just woaw. After this I have to say that skiing in Turkey is absolutely top class - forget travelling to Canada from Europe when you can get to this with no jetlag, much better food and all.
There is a traditional Turkish bath in the town and apparently the water of Ayder has healing powers. We went to the local (Turkish) public bath. Their water comes straight out of the ground at 42 degrees. It was very calm with about 10 local men enjoying the baths which is really a large marble pool where you walk around in it and wash off in the adjoining rooms where water flows straight out of taps. Even if there are separate changing rooms you are told to change in a cabin.
Day after day things started to become a little repetitive - wake up early, look at the weather, eat breakfast, go to helicopter, ski powder, come back to hotel, get massage, have dinner, go to sleep. It got to a point where I thought a nice little mountain town such as Champoluc would do wonders. Go to a restaurant, see other people, buy a drink in a bar and maybe go touring the next day rather than going up in a helicopter again. It sounds spoiled but it can become too much of a good thing. (See 'Final Thought' in the next post below ...)
Sunday 21 February 2010.-.11 15 pm
Heli-skiing in Turkey - Final Thought
Having said that, Turkey is a rather spectacular place to ski. Imagine if you would be all alone with a helicopter for a whole week in Zermatt or Chamonix after a snowstorm had left one meter of perfect snow - and that Chamonix or Zermatt had suddenly turned back to what it was 150 years ago. When we fly up or ski down we don't see any trace of humans except for some barns low down which are only used in summer when the locals drive their animals up to graze. What we look at must be similar to what the early skiers a la Dr Payot saw when he skied the haute route in 1903 (one of the most famous and most coveted ski tours in the world, with fantastic scenery and exhilarating skiing from Chamonix to Zermatt over remote alpine passes, traversing glaciers and requiring a number of nights in mountain refuges). Only he didn't have a helicopter to get an extreme experience (skiing 11k vertical in perfect powder is extreme) of empty big mountains.
I think the ideal skiing experience would be to combine heli and touring, and to stay in a nice mountain village with some life but it is difficult to get it all at the same time.
