Made with Xara Web Designer Snow & Plastic (Dendix or a variant) can happily co-exist for many skiers. Before the use of large scale indoor artificial snow- slopes, much of the year-round skiing & training taking place in the UK and utilised outdoor plastic slopes. These also supported a very healthy race programme. Many highly qualified young instructors now working in the Alps were intoduced to skiing on slopes such as the Oval and gained their first teaching qualifications there.  The Oval is now in excellent condition and offers a valuable local resource to supplement Club visits to Chill Factore. Members’ responses to the courses run at the Oval last season were very positive and two, three-week Wednesday Evening courses were run this Autumn. Hopefully, there will be sufficient interest from members to  justify further use  in the second part of the season.