So how was the skiing?

Since the days of “kids ski free if under 12”, we have only been skiing one other time, so my perspective is a bit dated... but...

First of all, you have to buy “insurance” if you want to be rescued on the slopes. We bought the insurance! Our organizer ordered the lift tickets ahead of time and just had to pick them up at the window. The window opened at 9 or 9:30 so we didn’t even leave the house until around 9:00. I remember the days at Steamboat in Colorado when we would get up early, take the lifts before you were allowed to ski, go to the top of the mountain and be one of the first to ski down when the “rope dropped”. At 10:30, we had only started to think about getting on the lifts to go ski. We are beginning to become more French… we just shrugged it off and decided to enjoy the moment!

The ski pass had to be placed in your LEFT pocket because there are no lift attendants... only scanning machines that are to your left as you enter the turnstiles for the lifts. Pretty cool. And at each lift, we were the ONLY ONES THERE! It was wonderful! No standing in lines anywhere. We first went to the top of the mountain to ski down from there. Seems that the trails are pretty vaguely defined… more like suggestions about where you might want to ski. The whole top of the mountain was wide open.. no trees or groomed trails… just tons of open space with lots and lots of deep powdery snow. The snow was so deep in places that when I fell (yes, I fell a few times) it was really difficult to get back up because you couldn’t find a hard place to push yourself up from.

The levels are defined by 4 colors. Black is the hardest, Red is second to hardest, then comes Blue and then Green. We skied Red mostly. The Blue was way too easy and actually hard to ski because you had to do a lot of self-propulsion and it was difficult in all of that deep snow. It seemed that there was no good middle between Blue and Red.

Once when we found ourselves at a place where the easier trail was closed and the only way down was Black, our French friend organizer suggested that we just traverse the mountain to get to the nearest easier slope. (What??? I thought… you got to be kidding.) The snow was about knee deep and I just couldn’t get through it so I had to take off my skis and walk. After that, I was so exhausted that when we got down to the next lift, we decided to just take it down and end the day... stay tuned for that story...it falls in the “nothing is easy” category!