Roger Cox: Room for compromise over CairnGorm Mountain dry ski slope plan

As regular readers of this column will know, there’s a very special place in my heart reserved for the U-shaped ski run in Coire na Ciste, on the quieter eastern side of the CairnGorm Mountain ski resort. I’m sure it’s plenty of fun on skis, but on a snowboard it can feel truly epic, like surfing two giant waves back to back. Most people tend to zip straight down the middle of it, which is fine, but in my humble opinion they’re missing the point. To get the most out of the Ciste, you really need to wait until it’s good and quiet and then treat it like a giant, snow-filled drainpipe: build up a decent head of steam across the Ptarmigan Bowl, and then, as the walls of the gully start to loom in your peripheral vision, climb up the wall on the right, get as high as you can without losing too much speed and then arc back down towards the bottom. Feel the Gs push you down into the soles of your boots as you transition from speeding down one side of the gully to speeding up the other, then put in another turn somewhere high up on the opposite wall and enjoy a split-second of weightlessness before swooping back down again. Repeat as many times as you can before you run out of road or before your knees buckle and you end up in a heap.