The guys at More Mountain now have a blog to keep you all up to date with goings on in their world of luxury chalets in Morzine.

Have a look at the More Mountain news here! 

The January camp with them is all booked up now so have a look at alternatives on the ‘Girls Snowboard Camps’ page of the Our Camp site.

The site now has all of the camp dates and information listed, have a look at the ‘camps’ page of the Our Camp website.

There is only 1 place left on the January camp, but plenty on the others so let us know if you’re interested.

Another thing we are offering this winter is 1 on 1 coaching on any of the weeks between camps, again, this is not for beginners but for anyone wanting help with their freestyle riding and in park, the info and price list of this offer is also on the ‘camps’ page of the site.

DAY FIVE
Claire is a biochemical engineer currently completing a PhD in London. She started snowboarding three years ago whilst working for a biotech firm in New Zealand, when her friends persuaded her to go up with them at the weekends. Since then she’s had a two week holiday in Fernie and spent a week in Serre Chevalier. She’s hardly done any freestyle, and decided to come to camp so that she could have more fun playing around on the slopes.

“I’m much better at learning from instruction than by just picking it up myself, and I get nervous learning around boys. They look so confident and it somehow that makes me feel less confident, so I just don’t give it a go. After this week, though, I do have more confidence, so now I’d be prepared to give things a shot even if I was not nearly as good as them. I felt a lot better doing the jumps today. I managed to get some air and actually I enjoy getting speed to go into the jumps now, whereas before it freaked me out – I barely even got up the jump when we first did it.

It’s nice to know that I can do the spins, too, even if it’s just low off the ground. We were trying spins off the banks on the side of the boardercross, so it wasn’t scary, it was just a case of getting used to getting around. I didn’t think I could do it at first but I can – now I don’t have to worry so much about the take off and spinning bit, I can start working on shifting my weight over to my front foot. Oh, and I did some good ollies today – we just watched it on the video. You can actually see my board go off the snow! And it felt good too – it felt solid. I was getting my knees up, getting my shoulders right.

Gilly helped me to see what I do wrong, which means that now I’m able to correct it. I’m a scientist: I need that blow-by-blow breakdown. I like to have a set of instructions and to analyse how I’m doing something – that’s just the way I process things. And I feel a lot more confident and a lot happier now. I had a crap second day; at first I thought that the other girls were so much better than me, but now I realise that’s just because most of them have been snowboarding for longer. Actually Michelle and I are pretty much at the same level, so I’ve realised that what I can’t do is just down to my lack of experience, not because I can’t inherently do it. This week has set me up so that now when I go on my next holiday I’ll try some 180s and to ride switch, and practise some hits on the side of the piste – it’s given me the confidence to try stuff on my own.

Day Four
Jenny is a biomedical engineer from Belfast. She teaches climbing, she kayaks, and she’s been snowboarding for about fourteen years, having started out going on school and family ski holidays. Surfing and skateboarding had always looked interesting to her, but she found the scene in Belfast a little bit intimidating and didn’t know how to get started. Snowboarding seemed more accessible – it was easy to find lessons, and she had seen other kids in the resorts doing it. After going to a dry slope back home on a regular basis, she decided to take five months off work this year to spend a season in Morzine. It was great, but she’s been feeling like she didn’t progress as much as she wanted, and has been stuck on a plateau. Originally she chose Our Camp simply because the dates fit her summer plans – but the more she found out about it, she realised that she was looking forward to having female coaches.

“I often don’t get on particularly well with male coaches that I’ve had in my various sports. This week has been so much more friendly and relaxed and so much more positive and encouraging than any coaching that I’ve had before. Today we rode the pipe for the first time this week. I tried riding into a small pipe before and fell flat on my face, which left me with a fear of them; they’re quite intimidating to look at. But Gilly had taught us how to do 90 degree hops on the slope so we knew how to do the turns already, and we’d been practising keeping low and kepping our base nice and flat on the boxes and the whoop-de-woos, so it was just a case of bringing that all across. We dropped in right at the start so it wasn’t so high – and it just felt right from the start. We weren’t trying to go too high at the beginning, just getting used to the turns, but that feeling of weightlessness – it was amazing.

“Then we moved on to some bigger kickers. The first time I went I was too slow, so the second time I straightlined it and the ground just fell away from me. After that I was worried about going too far, so third time around I followed Tamsin in and had just the right speed, which was great. We had the first ever Irish Snowboarding Championships this year in Livignio, and I’m feeling like I’m getting the confidence now to give that a go.

“We hurried down the mountain to go white water rafting. It was pretty tame compared to kayaking, but it was great fun because the instructor was completely mad – he made the whole trip like one big bumper car ride. Oh yeah – the owner of the rafting company came out with a load of leftovers to feed a piglet that he’d been given as a “stupid gift” (his words). I was feeding it the food and it – well, it tried to eat my thumb…”

Day Three
Michelle is a research chemist from Cork. She started snowboarding two years ago on her first ski holiday, did a snowboard taster on the last day and decided immediately to wave the skis goodbye. She’s only ridden about four weeks since then, but decided to give the camp a go because she wanted to ride in the summer.

Day Two
Jessica is a liftie – in Britain. She’s proud to work at Nevis Range, one of Scotland’s four remaining resorts, and this season (lasting from February through April) got in about five days a week on our very own powder, hardpack and heather. Having never ridden outside Scotland before, she had planned a summer trip to the Alps with some friends – aiming to get at least a few days on snow between now and next season. The friends canceled, Jessica typed in “girls’ freestyle camps”, and voila – she’s at Our Camp. Actually, that makes it sound a bit too easy: Jessica’s travel plans included a night bus from Scotland to Stansted, which first broke down and then abandoned her in Birmingham when she went to make a call to check on her flight. She rolled into 2 Alpes a day late, weary but determined…

“I can panic a lot about meeting new people, but when I arrived yesterday afternoon I found it really welcoming; everyone seemed really calm, despite the typical Scottish weather that they’d had up the hill. Fortunately the weather today was amazing, really hot and sunny. I only started riding in the park this year, but because I was in a group of girls I didn’t mind giving new stuff a go; at home the guys are always going huge, so unless I ride with the one other girl at our hill I find that I don’t really push myself. Today  landed my first backside 180, which I surprisingly found easier than a frontside one. Gilly was telling us to just give it a go and everyone was going down the slope trying new things together – it was a really good environment to learn in.

“This afternoon we went down to the fake lake. Gilly and Sara walked in and somehow made it look like it wasn’t cold, so me and Claire walked in and it was freezing! Then we did some yoga on the grass by the lake, surrounded by the mountains. I’ve wanted to try yoga for quite a while and it really felt like it was stretching out my muscles – so that will give me something to get started with now.

“Tomorrow I want to learn some tricks on the rails. Hardly any girls enter the Highlander Comp at Nevis Range, and there are some good prizes on offer, so I’m going to build up my confidence this week to give it a go. I do miss my little boy, especially seeing the other kids out here – but it’s also quite nice being able to relax. He’ll have a go at snowboarding in the next couple of years but I won’t force him to do anything. I don’t care what he does – skiing, even blading - so long as he comes up the hill so that I can get to ride!”

Day One
Sara Helme is a computer programmer from Cheltenham. She’s been snowboarding for seven years: her boyfriend “dragged her into it” and she’s never looked back. She was fascinated by it right from the start, even though it wasn’t until the second week of her second holiday that she could turn toe edge. Now she spends two weeks of every winter in Canada, and tries to get some indoor riding in at least once a month.

“Usually a whole bunch of us go to Canada; we all ride together and spend a lot of time in the trees, but nobody else is really interested in going into the park. I’ve always wanted to get more into freestyle, so I thought it would be good to come and do it on a girls’ camp. There’s only one other girl in our crew usually, and I like riding with guys, but with girls it’s just more comfortable – you relax a bit more. Seems like guys are always trying to impress each other, and are more competitive than supportive. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why they don’t want to ride in the park when we’re on holiday – perhaps they’re too embarrassed to fall?

“Today was flipping windy! My first thought was damn, I forgot my neck gaiter. But surprisingly, it didn’t matter; it was such good fun. I’ve been trying to do 180s for two years: I had an idea of what I needed to be doing, but it’s never really clicked. Normally I have a couple of goes, turn 90, smack my head on the floor and give up. But today Gilly helped me visualise exactly what I needed to do and then – I just got up and did it! I think that I just needed to have it broken down and then relate that to what my body was doing. By the time we had to go down because of high winds, my legs were exhausted but I was so pleased. I could do a f/s 180, ride it out switch, and then pop it back – just really chuffed.

“The weather got better in town in the afternoon, and we had a go at skating. I’ve never skateboarded before so I’m impressed that I managed not to kill myself. I’ve always looked at people skating before and just thought it looked really hard, but everyone did so well and it was brilliant fun, It was nice to see the sun, but I don’t really care what the weather’s doing – I’m just thinking snowboard snowboard snowboard snowboard… “