La Vie en Snow
If you recall from my “f**k the cold” post, Lee and I decided (while freezing our butts off with a broken heater in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel) to spend January skiing in France. Sure, we could have rented a place for a month in the US and done the same thing here, but we figured it is easy for us to get to US ski destinations. We probably won’t have another opportunity to spend a whole month in another country for a while. Ergo, France!
We spent two weeks on the east coast visiting friends and family over the holidays. I popped up to Maine and Massachusetts for several days to visit with my grandparents and some of my dearest friends. It felt short compared to my my month-long tour of the northeast in August, but I am still so grateful that I’ve gotten to spend quality, undistracted time with some of the people closest to me during this year off.
We departed from Newark on January 5, and our trip was already off to a rocky start. Lee had been battling a sinus infection over the holidays, and then the week before we left, I picked up some nasty bug. Our flight was delayed leaving Newark for a silly reason, so we missed our connecting flight in London. We got rebooked onto a new flight, our bags with all of our ski gear did not, and we spent two days in Geneva waiting for them to arrive. The biggest travel pro-tip that I can offer: if you haven’t already, GET AIRTAGS.
Fortunately, once we got to France, our luck changed. Our first two weeks were blessed with nearly nightly snowfalls of ~6”. After an unusually warm and dry winter in the Alps, we were worried about poor ski conditions, but the weather turned several days before we arrived and snow continued for our entire time in Val D’Isère. The town center retains much of the original 17th century architecture, so it felt like wandering through a storybook, albeit one with North Face and Oakley. The mountains are some of the highest in France, so the views were unparalleled. And the resort itself was massive; it is actually three interconnected ski areas, so we could ski from town to town throughout the day, taking advantage of the varying terrain and vibes of each area.
I started skiing about seven years ago, but I’ve only gone a couple times a year, so my progress has been slow. I classified myself as a high beginner/low intermediate at the beginning of this trip, and I was excited to finally get the quantity of practice that I needed to improve. And improve I did! I started our first day hesitantly going down blues, stopping every few hundred feet to take a break, leaving Lee waiting bored at the bottom. Within a few days I was tackling reds, and by the beginning of our second week, Lee persuaded me to attempt the infamous Face de Bellevarde, the steepest run in the resort at a maximum 71% grade, and route for the 1992 Olympic downhill. La Face is a right of passage at Valdi, but known for being a sheet of ice at the end of the day. I might have done it slowly, but I did it multiple times and managed not to fall, which left me feeling pretty accomplished considering I had been warming up on greens only a week prior. By the end of our second week, I was *almost* keeping up with Lee on groomed runs, trailing behind him by several seconds, and feeling infinitely more confident than when I arrived.
That confidence and improvement ended with the piste, however; one area of skiing I have yet to figure out is powder. The nightly snow meant fresh pow most days, and my skis are more than capable of handling a few inches of the stuff. But the ski is only as good as the skier, and when I hit powder, any knowledge of how to ski flies out the window. One of Lee’s greatest strengths in our relationship is his ability to map physical challenges to my level and growth areas; he always knows how to find a trail, or a slope, or an obstacle that I would never have attempted on my own but is within the realm of my ability. He is also infuriatingly good at hyping me up to make me believe that I can do it, and then when I inevitably want to chicken out at the top, deploying masterful mind games that both shame me for thinking about quitting while bolstering my confidence that I am capable of doing it. It usually ends with me yelling at him for pushing me past my abilities, him saying something like, “fine, if you don’t want to get better, then suit yourself” before taking off down the hill, and me sitting there thinking, “psh I’ll show that asshole!” and sending it. It works every time.
While I did get some powder practice in Valdi, our luck with weather didn’t hold out. We spent the second half of the trip in Les Trois Vallées without a single centimeter of snow. By our second week there, the slopes were a sheet of ice, and the town was becoming overrun due to the upcoming Alpine Ski World Championships. We were a little disappointed, but shrugged these hurdles off, figuring that we had had two+ weeks of amazing skiing, and there was no sense in forcing ourselves to do something less fun just for the sake of it. Instead, we spent our last week in France enjoying the food, going on hikes, and taking care of some upcoming logistics for our move from California to Colorado.
There’s too much to cover about a month abroad anywhere, so rather than ramble more, here are the highlights from our time in France:
Ski progress: I felt things finally “click” that I had been struggling with for years. I experienced this joy in the past year with mountain biking, too, but that took months. Seeing results with my skiing in mere weeks was a huge boost.
Scale: European ski areas are simply massive. Espace Killy is 24,000 acres, and les Trois Vallées is just under 26,000 acres. For reference, Whistler, which is the largest resort in North America, is 8,000 acres. European ski areas are so huge because they are usually multiple interconnected resorts that you can ski freely between, which is uncommon in the US. We spent our days exploring the different areas in search of the best snow and funnest runs, and each day felt like a totally new adventure.
Food: My standard ski lunch fare is chili or a burger. In France, I ate everything from gnocchi carbonara to French onion soup. I was in heaven. That combined with the cheese shops, pastries, and inexpensive wine left me feeling very happy. I would have been feeling very round, too, were it not for the hours of skiing every day.
Language: I minored in French, which you’d never know based on my current proficiency. It was a blast to get a whole month of practice, and I could feel some of my former confidence return.
Views: After a year of traveling, hiking, and biking through some of the most magnificent mountain views I have ever seen, I thought the magic might have worn off. Nope. The Alps are one of the most gorgeous places I have ever been, and we’d love to go back in the summertime for a mountain bike trip. Maybe next year…
