Krasnaya Polyana

Having decided not to go to Kazakhstan, I successfully managed to organise a heliboarding trip in the Caucus mountains in only 6 days. On Monday Tony and I decided to go, by Tuesday morning we had our tickets to Moscow which I booked on ebookers (I had trouble with the Aeroflot site all of Monday night) and queued forever outside the Russian embassy in Bern and paid through our noses for a same day visa, and by Saturday night we were walking around Red square, drinking beer and being lead aimlessly into the Russian night.

Russian night clubs are great. The women are beautiful. Many of the clubs have face control. If you aren't pretty, handsome or rich enough to make it irrelevant, you aren't allowed in. I think that only really applies to locals. How else would I explain the fact that both Tony and I got in without a hitch. Well, I am just being silly because if you have ever seen either of us you would know that we are both super good looking... I would even venture as far as to say that we are blue steel good looking! I wonder how we will cope when we are back in Moscow with Andrew and Colleen in a few weeks en route to Kamchatka?

We really couldn't have organised things nearly this well if it hadn't been for Matt from Waytorussia.com. He was super well organised and we got an excellent deal. Matt, our hotel in Moscow wasn't great. It was part of the Olympic village way back when, but the reality was that we headed into the heart of Moscow and enjoyed the sites, sounds, and drinks, the moment we settled in. I was last in Moscow as a young 15 year old. In 12 years it had changed dramatically. I don't think that does it justice.... but then this blog is about snowboarding and not about the fall of Communism so I will move on.

Traveler's Wisdom Note #2: before traveling in a country, check to see when the clocks change. This, as well as avoiding too much drink the night before, can prevent unnecessarily missed flights.

(Travel Wisdom Note 1. - travel with a trophy to breeze through airport hassles).

It was only upon arrival in our hotel in Krasnaya Polyana on Saturday evening that I noticed that the clocks showed a different time to that of Moscow and on asking the cute receptionist (Christina, clearly distinguishable from Julia) whether we were in a different time zone to Moscow, did I learn that the clocks had moved an hour forward the previous night.

Having run into Dave Downing upon our arrival at Shermetyevo in Moscow, we ran into Jake Burton Carpenter and a crew of his in Krasnaya Polyana on our first night. They too were dining at Mark Testut's fine French restaurant which seemed so out of place in KP. We had a chat to Jeff from Jersey, one of the camera men and learned that they were shooting for the film "For Right or Wrong". We got the low down on the weather and the forecast for the next few days, and were told that we would be certain to see them in the coming days. KP is not a big place. Well it wasn't then. It seems like it is set to go with the 2014 winter Olympics being awarded to Sochi last year. Loads of money was getting pumped into the place when we were there in March 2006.

Krasnaya Polyana was my first heliboarding experience. Having come to snowboarding quite late in my life, and having ridden a lot of the same terrain in Switzerland for the preceding couple of years, I think I was always going to be easily pleased. I am certain that I would go back there, but I would choose to go earlier in the season, and I would attempt to fill the Mi8, which has a capacity of as many as 16 customers, with better riders. The last thing you want is to be taken down easy runs all day because you have some rich Oil Oligarch with his 10 year old son that wants gentle rolling terrain, and he is prepared to pay for whatever it is that he wants. Very quickly epic heliboarding in Russia isn't so cheap and a Russian military helicopter can become a glorified chairlift.

Luckily that didn't happen to us... very often. Our guides were brilliant. They let us skip the runs that we didn't think looked like the goods and we didn't pay for that. On other runs, one of the guides would take one route with the less experienced skiers and Nikolay, the other guide, would take us down more challenging runs.

I think I could have asked for better snow from top to bottom (there we freeze-thaw conditions that you noticed on some of the runs with bigger vertical drops), but that is my fault for only going at the end of March. Every run offered us fresh tracks, and the terrain was endless, with Domba and Mt Elbrus at 5700 meters visible in the distance. We had the opportunity to spot brown bears from the helicopter while we scouted out terrain. The terrain was awesome and untouched and at each drop site, runs to the North East would lead you into Georgia and those to the South West would keep you in the safety of Russian territory with a Russian Ministry of Defence mi8 waiting to pick you up at the bottom of each descent.

Later discussions with Nikolay lead me to learn about Kamchatka and the Russian far east. Heli operations are generally run by Vertikalny Mir in Krasnaya Polyana from January through to March and then in April they head through to Kamchatka. Any earlier in Kamchatka I am told, doesn't guarantee you much flying time as the storms are too frequent. Nikolay and I also spoke about Kazakhstan and he confirmed some of the horrors stories I had earlier heard about. He told me that the snow in Kazakhstan had always been renowned for being very fast and in the former Soviet Union, it had been the place where speed skiing records would always be set. As well as having these strange characteristics, he told me that the snow has a propensity to avalanche at really low pitches of as low as 15%. I don't know how true all of this it is, but on the authority of the guide that I entrusted with my life for the previous week, I was happy to let my imagination turn to new destinations where I could explore my passion.

And thus was the seed planted for my trip to Kamchatka in April 2007 before my knee injury precipitated a postponement to April 2008.