Seasonaire secrets: five things no one tells you about doing a ski season
As a serial seasonnaire, I've pretty much seen it all. I could carp on about all the usual stuff – mid-season blues, pushy punters, squalid living conditions – but you’ve probably heard most of that before from the litany of judgemental ‘Season workers drink own urine in initiation ceremony from hell’-style articles that get published every year.'
Instead, think of me as metaphorically kicking you off the chairlift of lost hope into the powder bowl of joy with five sage words of wisdom about doing a ski season they don’t tell you in the corporate handbook.
1. The person who wrote your job description has a vivid imagination and a buttery grip on the truth
Imagine the most disorganised place you have ever worked. Now times that by a thousand and imagine it all shook up and down like a snow globe.
The logistics behind the average ski holiday are clumsily man-handled by a rich and varied array of extremely hungover, under-qualified and disgruntled individuals. And you'll become one of them.
If the job description says, “You must be confident, flexible, a good listener and able to think clearly and rationally in a crisis,” you can roughly translate that as, “When it all goes tits up you’re on your own buster, so you’d better be good at fielding proverbial faecal matter.”
Resort Manager? You’re basically Piggy from Lord of the Flies. Ski instructor? Six months on the magic carpet with 10 toddlers ought to really test your qualifications. Working in a ski hire shop? You spend your days getting large things in small spaces. That's not a euphemism. It's people's feet.
2. Once a week you’ll have 24 golden hours of total freedom. Don’t waste them
If you’ve been mainlining Jägermeister all night, don’t be pathetic and spend your day off groaning in bed like a toad shrivelling up on an Aga. As the weeks slide past in a blur of transfer days, cleaning toilets, hangovers, crises of varying sizes and shapes and a parade of punters with ‘I’m-on-holiday-and-am-therefore-a-demi-god’ syndrome, the faint glimmer of hope that is your day off will be the only thing that keeps you from slipping into a deep, profound depression.
It may feel like a donkey is trying to kick its way out of your skull, but pay attention, this next bit is critical. Get up off your arse and go riding. Fresh air and adrenalin are the best hangover cures known to man. Within an hour your agonies will be assuaged and you will have remembered why you came to the mountains in the first place. By four o’clock you’ll have forgotten the donkey altogether.
3. Let angry people be angry
When a 5’2”, middle-aged, slurring chalet guest with bought-and-paid-for gout is bellowing into your chest with rage because you left some shopping bags in the back of his Porsche Cayenne or failed to top up the Jo Malone hand soap in the downstairs loo, don’t let it get you down. Remember when you’re enjoying a few tinnies with your mates and having a good guffaw half way up the chairlift later that afternoon, they will still be a miserable sod who’s lost touch with everything that’s sacred.
4. Skiing is awesome but accidents can and do happen
Occasionally you hit the sweet spot. You wake up to a stunning, bluebird powder morning on your day off. With all that beauty on your front doorstep it’s easy to forget you’re doing an extreme sport in an extreme environment. If you’ve never attempted a back flip, don’t first try one on your 25th birthday after a few shots of absinthe. I’m not saying don’t push yourself, or try to improve your skills; I’m just saying accidents happen. It won’t be until you find yourself dangling over a precipice by your ankle, after naively following your roommate into the backcountry because he said it “looks fine” that you wish you’d respected the mountain that little bit more.
5. Being naked on snow is OK. McConkey says so
What’s the biggest problem with skiing? Snobbery and stereotype – the idea that snowsports are the reserve of the ‘braying middle class ski bore’ and his or her children China, India and Tarquin. In truth all that stuff is irrelevant. I've met a huge variety of different people from all walks of life on my journey through the alpine abyss, united by one common theme – a love of the mountains.
The funny thing about skiing or snowboarding is that you can’t actually just pay to be good at it. You have to love it. You have to work at it. This presents the strange irony that snowsports are in fact a great leveller.
No one championed this idea better than the late pro-skier Shane McConkey, the daddy of getting rad on the hill in offensive fancy dress, and indeed, frolicking in the buff all over the mountain. It may seem juvenile, but when you boil it back, strip away all the contrived gear, in-fighting and glossy oligarch-owned chalets, isn’t the whole point of skiing that it’s just supposed to be fun?
Belle de Neige is a former chalet girl, blogger and author of Tales of Catastrophe Sex and Squalor from the Alpine Underbelly.
