Book on Off-Piste by Wayne Watson
We now have some stock of this book which provides an excellent introduction to off-piste.
Waynes book goes beyond avalanche safety into a whole range of practical advice to help you get more from off-piste skiing
Here are some reviews of the book
'If you can side-slip, you can get down anything,' Wayne Watson, skiing guide and instructor, is fond of telling his pupils. And he should know, for he has been taking skiers of all sorts - good, nervous, overconfident - off the carefully groomed pistes in the Val d'Isere area for nearly 20 years . Now he has distilled all this experience into an encouraging, unusual, well-illustrated book.
It is, as Wayne says, real skiing, with ever-changing conditions and challenges. Like many others I've discovered going off the pistes quickly sorts the men from the boys. I'm always uneasy when venturing off manicured slopes. I can side-slip though, down the steep and the icy, and find Wayne's advice emboldening.
You may or may not have heard of kick turns. It's a complicated exercise that in the old days of long wooden skis everyone had to master. At the end of a traverse across a steep slope it was often the only way to reposition yourself for going off at another tack. But a lack of practice in this manoeuvre, which involves at one moment standing on two skis pointing in opposite directions, means many are not proficient at it.
Good old Wayne writes that 'as a general rule I ask my clients to avoid doing kick-turns on steep slopes with firm snow'. He explains that most people can't complete them and 'when someone blows a kick-turn' the consequences can be terrifying. If you do find yourself sliding fast down a firm-snow slope however, let's hope you have read Wayne's advice on the art of self-arrest or at least have studied the photo sequence that shows you what to do to stop safely. Kick off your skis, make sure your are sliding feet first, turn on your tummy and dig your elbows and boot-toes in.
He sprinkles the book with anecdotes about various clients. And it is only too easy to imagine yourself in their various dilemmas, waiting for Wayne to come to your rescue. It's all great fun and strangely compelling, the next best thing indeed to being off-piste.
If you want to do some serious off piste skiing (and I don't mean skiing just the other side of the piste markers), this is a book for you. Two thirds of the book is dedicated to safety, starting out with some pretty scary stories about avalanche accidents. The most telling anecdote was of a piste skier who triggered an avalanche while crossing over to the adjacent piste. The moral I drew from this story was: don't ski down the wrong side of piste markers if you can't assess the avalanche risk.
The author is a Val d'Isere-based guide so if you're familiar with the area, you'll love it. Most books on snow safety in English are written for the North American audience so it's nice that this is aimed more at those that ski in Europe. A good practical guide to skiing off piste
Price: £19.95
£19.95