I came to skiing late – I had hit 40 and was trying to find a family holiday that everyone was keen to go on. It worked – what could be better than a week of fresh air atop a beautiful French mountain? There was snow galore, plenty of adrenaline-fuelled fun and a mindboggling quantity of hot chocolate (plus vin chaud for the adults).
Ever since that first family ski holiday, I had often thought about how much fun a ski season would have been in a gap year or just after university. You know the kind of thing: living in the Alps from December to April and working in a bar or a chalet, skiing or snowboarding in your time off, hitting the bars until the small hours and existing on ludicrously little sleep.
Of course, Brexit means that even if I still had the energy to ski and do a full-time job cleaning loos and changing beds, the chances of getting a work permit would be vanishingly small. The specific rules around it vary between countries, but in France you need a job offer and for the employer to have advertised it to EU-qualified people for a time before turning to outside help. The Brexit reality for UK youngsters is that there are plenty of young people from mainland Europe, Ireland (as well as Aussies, who have a reciprocal working holiday agreement) to fill up the seasonal ski jobs without employers needing to deal with the bureaucracy of hiring someone from the UK.
My chances of ever going on a ski season were, I thought, doomed. Until that is, I discovered the Ski Club of Great Britain’s rep scheme – a different, more concentrated way of doing a season for people who are in it mainly for the skiing rather than the partying. They have reps in Europe and North America, and have recently reintroduced them into a selection of French resorts after being absent for almost a decade.
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Could this be my way into a ski season, a chance to ski for a month or more instead of a week on school holidays? I headed to Tignes in the French Alps to try my hand at being a rep in the company of Mark Brailey, who has been repping for the past four years in Austria, Switzerland and now France.
Mark, 63, lives in Bristol and owns a web marketing company. A laptop and a good broadband connection are all he needs to stay on top of things when he is in the mountains. He became a rep after being warned by his doctor about his unhealthy lifestyle. He decided to get fitter and to do more of the things he loved. This year he’s done a month on the slopes, a mini-ski season where he’s skied all day every day and crammed as much time on the slopes as a gap-year student might in five months.
Our days started at 9.30am at the foot of the slopes in Tignes Val Claret. It was snowing heavily on the first day and only two Ski Club members joined us, keen to explore the fresh snow. An important part of the rep role is to diplomatically take on the role of the sensible one in the group, so Mark and I suggested a few runs down blues and reds to gauge the quality of the snow and the level of everyone’s ability before getting stuck into the trickier stuff.
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The people in your group vary from day to day, and different abilities can require some management. As a rep, the emphasis is on safety, so you would need to stick with the less advanced skiers and make sure everyone gets home safely, rather than ploughing on ahead with the more capable bunch. You’re not a guide, though, more of a facilitator with good knowledge of the slopes in the ski area who can suggest, but not lead.
That being said, reps must be able to ski both on-and off-piste to an advanced level, taking bumpy blacks in their stride and zooming down all but the toughest off-piste.
My resort, Tignes, is known for being a party town with a young crowd but, with a maximum altitude of 3,456m, the on-and off-piste skiing is popular with Ski Club members of all ages. While you don’t necessarily need to be an extrovert, you do need to enjoy meeting new people. Reps work six days a week, socialising on the slopes and hosting the social hour in a local bar from 5–6pm each evening.
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The social hour is a casual affair. It’s more about being there to chat rather than make welcome speeches. This is just as well as it can be an effort to be super bright and breezy when you’re middle-aged and tired after a full day’s skiing. We settle down in Le Couloir, a dark-wood pub that makes for a nicely relaxed, rather than full-on boozy, apres-ski experience. University gap-year me would have found it a little dull, no doubt, but then he would have been even more aghast at my 10.30pm bedtime. C’est la vie.
How to do it
Before you can become a rep for the Ski Club of Great Britain, there’s a compulsory 11-day mountain safety and leadership course, which costs £3,499 and qualifies you for five years of repping before you need to take a refresher course. The course takes place this year in Tignes from 2–14 December. For more information, visit skiclub.co.uk.
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