This morning Hydle and I actually woke up before Rhinehart because he ended up going out a little bit last night and we stayed in to catch up on some sleep. Last night, I ended up knocking my (empty) wine glass off the armrest of the couch and broke the glass. This morning, while shuffling around dealing with breakfast stuff, Rhinehart broke a glass. Then, Hydle and I were ready slightly before Rhinehart, and we were giving him crap because partially why he was ready after us was because he was cleaning up his broken glass.

So, then, Rhinehart finished up getting ready ready first and walked out the door just to prove he actually was ready before us, and Hydle was like “fine, then this is why I’m late too!” and he threw his glass off to the side and it bounced onto the patio (the door happened to be open) and broke on the patio. Haha, of course when he breaks a glass on purpose, it breaks outside, so convenient!

After that we headed off to the mountain since we knew we had a long day ahead of us checking off St Martin de Belleville and Les Menuires. Hydle has been “training” me all week, giving me lessons and drills on how to get in and out of my skis the quickest, skate fast between lifts, pop my bindings off and grab my skis and run fast, etc. So, I initially had trouble pulling my skis apart because the brakes were criss crossed, and when I finally made it to the first gondola line of the morning, Hydle was there tapping his wrist to let me know I wasn’t fast enough. Everything is a test, and he’s like a drill sergeant in training for this final race day on Friday!

We first skied straight over to St Martin de Belleville where there was a sign at the top of the run that led into the village that warned us that it may be poor coverage and dangerous and to be safe. Haha. It turned out to be one of the most fun, sunshine lit, smooth, soft groomers we’ve skied yet, with full coverage!

We lapped that twice, got our stamps done in the village, and then headed back up to then make it over to Les Menuires, which was a ways away also. Of course we ran into Adam like we always do en route to Les Menuires, so he grouped up with us for a bit too.

It took us a few runs/lifts/gondolas to get up to the top of Les Menuires, La Masse 2 lift, and we ran into Trevor, Colin and Ryan, other epic racers we hung out with at the top of Verbier! We chatted with them, and then next up, we ran into Jeff and Jannah Din who we had lunch with yesterday! Jannah’s knee was hurting her, so she said she was going to take the gondola down, and the rest of us skied down a pretty fun run, into a sunshine filled deck at a restaurant that had “La Masse” in the name I think.

Adam branched off, and we had a nice lunch on the deck with Jannah and Jeff. The sun went down on the deck at the lunch spot right around 2, so we decided to head off and go get our stamps done at Les Menuires.

We rode the funnest lift yet on the way to Les Menuires. It was a 5 pack people mover that basically crossed you over the road into the Les Menuires village. Since there were 5 of us, we each grabbed one of the people movers, and had some fun taking pics and videos on the ride over with one of us per people mover all lined up in a train formation.

From there, we got our stamps, and then started to make our way back to Meribel, since you have to start kinda early to make it back to your home base village when you’re on a mountain this huge.

On our way back, we got distracted by a super sunny deck that had tons of lounge chairs facing the sun. We grabbed a round of beers there, took more fun panoramas, and kept saying we felt like we were at the beach, except we were epic racing!

Jannah’s knee was hurting pretty bad by this point (she is recovering from knee surgery, and kinda re-injured it yesterday she said). So, we cruised nice and slow back towared Meribel.

On literally the last run of the day. The home stretch run. The crew was skiing pretty slow actually because we were making sure Jannah was going to make it down ok, as she was taking her time with her hurt knee.

I have NO idea how this happened, but I was cruising last in line of the 5 of us, Jeff was 4th, and we were all going at a moderate speed for our normal pace, and Jeff somehow caught an edge and launched himself forward up and over his skis. I really have no idea how he crashed this hard, he’s an experienced skier, and there was no bumps in the snow that would have really explained how he crashed, but somehow he went sailing forward over his skis, and his shoulder and head hit first, and then he somersaulted over and one of his skis popped off. It was so gnarly. I haven’t seen a crash like that in a long time. Ugh.

I stopped and asked him if he was ok as I was picking up one of his poles. At first he seemed alright, but I told him “Dude chill out for a second, that was a super gnarly crash, don’t try to get up yet.” So he sat there for a bit, and I kept asking him questions like “did you hit your head? What hurts? How do you feel?” and he got a little bit more out of it with each question and I said “you look really sick, you’re out of it, I’m going to get someone to get ski patrol for you.” At first he was insisting he was fine and that his shoulder just hurt a little bit, but I kept saying there was no way I was letting him stand up yet because it was clear he was pretty out of it. As I was telling him he should just relax and lay down because we were gonna get ski patrol, his eyes kinda rolled back and he laid down and fainted/passed out, but with his eyes open.

This freaked me out because I was worried that he was passing out because of a head injury. But when he came to about 30 second later, he was actually a lot more coherent than before. I still insisted we were getting ski patrol because I was still worried that he passed out because of hitting his head. But then he started answering all of my questions normally, and he said that he has a history of fainting any time he has an injury, or even when he gets his blood pressure taken! When he said “Cooley, I know I can ski back down, I’m ok” I started to realize he was probably ok, but he did say his shoulder was still hurting. So I asked him if I could see his shoulder, and unzipped his jacket and felt it and he had a big bump/bone lodged up from his shoulder.

The ski patrol finally came, but Jeff was pretty insistent on not wanting to get loaded up in the toboggan because he knew he could ski it down, and then when the ski patrol told us if he took the ride down, it would be considered a rescue and it would require insurance paperwork, etc, I realized it probably would be ok for him to ski down.

So, we took it nice and easy, and skied down, and finally made it to where the rest of our group was waiting for us (this was probably at least 25 minutes after his crash, so they had been waiting a while!).

Jeff ended up going to the doctor, and this evening Jannah sent us a Facebook message with a picture of his xray that showed his collarbone was broken. ☹ Poor guy. They are so cool, I’m super bummed that he broke his collarbone, and Jannah reinjured her knee. Ugh. But at least we made some new friends, they are awesome, stoked we met up and got to spend the day with them, hopefully we will get to still hang some more too!

Now we came back to the room, and Hydle and I decided to try to go to the mini grocery store/market across the street to try to find some options for dinner. Well, Rhinehart is gluten free/celiac, so he definitely can not mess with having any gluten. This is difficult because none of us know French, which all of the food labels are in, and the grocery store didn’t’ have a lot of options. So after striking out on every idea we had for dinner (and being pretty tired of eating meat and cheese only) we decided to forget it and that we would go out to dinner.

So we are about to head out for our first night out in Meribel, hopefully it rocks!! Feel better Jeff!

Hydle’s Video – Saint Martin de Belleville

Rhinehart’s Video – Les Menuires
Hydle’s Video – Les Menuires
Cooley’s Video – Saint Martin de Belleville
Cooley’s Video – Les Menuires