PomfretPlunge
New member
Last week I got sent on a biz trip to the UK. I had read someplace about a new indoor skiing place just outside of London -- Hemel Hempstead SnowCentre. www.thesnowcentre.com
So I dragged my skis along. My colleagues kinda laughed but I had to treat that jones. Definitely check it out if you're over there.
The slope is inside a giant shed. It's about 75 vertical feet, about 100 feet wide, and about 500 feet long. Two little poma lifts going up, one on each side of the shed. Temp is about 25 degrees, pleasantly chill. The walls are painted with a big mural of the Alps which gives a sense of depth. The snow quality is really lovely -- perfect light powder
. It got kinda crowded with maybe 50-60 people skiing at once, but there were a lot of beginners and they mostly just bunched up at the top, the slope itself was usually free. Most of the traffic used a wide band down the middle and of course they sprayed all the snow over to the sides. So you got this perfect ten-foot band of soft powder right down alongside the poma on skier's right. I skied it over & over and got a bit of a zipperline going. Exactly 30 mogul turns, just steep enough at the top to be fun and then a gentle runout. The instructors/patrollers were not too happy with ruts & mini-bumps forming while the crowd was thickest (8-9:30 PM) :argue: but later in the evening once the crowd thinned out it was no problem. They said later on they are thinking of doing serious mogul nights every other week or so in which they would seed up a bunch of lines with their mini-snowcat. Anyway, slightly silly 'cause of the small size, but lovely conditions and you can do lap after lap which is all a newbie bump skier needs to have fun. I had a great time :smile:
Peace
Plunge
So I dragged my skis along. My colleagues kinda laughed but I had to treat that jones. Definitely check it out if you're over there.
The slope is inside a giant shed. It's about 75 vertical feet, about 100 feet wide, and about 500 feet long. Two little poma lifts going up, one on each side of the shed. Temp is about 25 degrees, pleasantly chill. The walls are painted with a big mural of the Alps which gives a sense of depth. The snow quality is really lovely -- perfect light powder
. It got kinda crowded with maybe 50-60 people skiing at once, but there were a lot of beginners and they mostly just bunched up at the top, the slope itself was usually free. Most of the traffic used a wide band down the middle and of course they sprayed all the snow over to the sides. So you got this perfect ten-foot band of soft powder right down alongside the poma on skier's right. I skied it over & over and got a bit of a zipperline going. Exactly 30 mogul turns, just steep enough at the top to be fun and then a gentle runout. The instructors/patrollers were not too happy with ruts & mini-bumps forming while the crowd was thickest (8-9:30 PM) :argue: but later in the evening once the crowd thinned out it was no problem. They said later on they are thinking of doing serious mogul nights every other week or so in which they would seed up a bunch of lines with their mini-snowcat. Anyway, slightly silly 'cause of the small size, but lovely conditions and you can do lap after lap which is all a newbie bump skier needs to have fun. I had a great time :smile:Peace
Plunge
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<Jones>
