Ah, I know those colours well now... and it's not because they're the colour of my bruises, although I did end up with an absolute pearler of a bruise after my first ski outing at Glen Eden. In my last post I noted that I fell after a jump and landed on my right hip pocket, where my cell phone was located. I thought that I just had a bit of a corkie, but in fact I grew a huge purple and black bruise. It's nearly faded now, 2 and a half weeks later. So my bruise was black and blue, but no green thank goodness. No the green is the easiest colour ski run, blue is intermediate, and the blacks (single and double black diamonds) are the hard and insane difficulties. Glen Eden, our local hill, has 6 or 7 runs and they're all green, Mont Tremblant has 17 green runs, 31 blue, 36 single black and 10 double blacks... It's not particularly tall, only 875m compared to Mt Buller in Victoria at over 1800m but it doesn't need to be high in Quebec for it to have snow, there's snow at sea level during winter there. An most of Tremblants height is ski-able, the vertical drop from the summit to the village below is 650m, making for some extremely long runs, the longest at around 6kms. It's a serious hill, the photos don't do it justice as you'll see below, the left side is a black run and the right is a fairly steep blue, looks pretty mild in the photo sadly, trust me it's not.
We set off early at around 04:45 to beat the Toronto traffic, especially the 401 Expressway which turns into a car park after about 6:30 despite being 8 lanes wide in each direction. A bit of drama as we pass east of Toronto and into Oshawa where the car in the lane to our immediate right suddenly has a blow out on the driver-side front tyre and screeches off the road in a shower of sparks, the kids don't notice as they're still pretty tired. It's 699kms from Oakville to Mont Tremblant and despite 2 or 3 brief stops for gas, food and comfort we arrived at our lodge just after midday and far too early to check into our room. So we walked around the village which is pretty stunning and found somewhere to eat lunch. Afterwards our room was ready and we unloaded the car and settled into our digs. Nice digs too but only a queen in the bedroom so the kids fight it out for who shares the sofa-bed and who gets the roll-away (trundle-bed). How sad, Jo and I actually have a bedroom to ourselves on a family holiday... there's a first time for everything. The rest of the suite was top notch and included a full kitchen, dinning table and since it's a corner room has a bay-window style set up in the lounge. Really nice place. The rest of the families start to arrive, Kent and Alex our friends from cottage holidays and Abbies best friend Jackie. The have a bunch of other families that they do this type of trip with each year and we do the intros, all around a nice bunch of folks and plenty of kids to make sure none of ours is lonely. Our lodge is in the photo below, our room is in the right hand 'turret', middle floor.
We're up on Thursday to beautiful sunshine and blue skies, which at Tremblant means freezing cold. It's around -20 with the wind chill and that's down in the village, on the summit it's closer to -30 in the wind. Abs and Cam went into an all-day lesson and Jo, Jazz and I hit the hill for the first time with the rest of the crew, about 20+ of us in all to take the easiest run down the mountain. The mountain has a north and south side, the later being the site for the village so the normal way we try to find our way off the summit is via the south green run, but on this occasion it's closed. So we go down the north side and hope that the south green is open when we come back up. Jazz has some trouble on the icy surface and comes unstuck a few times, I have to coach her a little to help her get her confidence back but soon she's getting along with no problems and after a fairly leisurely run we're at the bottom and ready to take the Duncan Express quad-chair back to the summit. The main lift on the south side is a gondola, an enclosed 8 person bubble with racks for your skis outside. The Duncan Express is an open chair and man was it cold coming up the north face... when the hairs in your nose freeze it's cold. I split off from the rest of the family and gave my first blue run a try with some of the others in the group. It was pretty icy conditions but at least it was consistent so I was able to handle it pretty well. I did come to grief once on the blue run but funnily enough it wasn't on any of the steep sections, it was a flat area were I tried something different that I came unstuck. I think we did 5-6 runs that day, not flat out by any means, some of the others finished 7 or 8 but we didn't try to kill ourselves either. With the lifts stopping at 15:30 the day ends quickly, a few beers and bed beckons, we're asleep before 20:30.
I had promised Kent I would try to make it up early for a few runs but I had a crappy nights sleep and couldn't get out of bed. Outside it became overcast and some snow fell off and on all day. On the mountain it was very windy so any exposed parts of a trail would have all the snow blown clear away exposing hard packed ice creating pretty difficult conditions. Jasmine and I had one awesome run down the south side by ourselves, we passed everyone as we came down fast and shot through some very icy sections at well over 60 kph. I think we finished the 6km run in around 12 minutes, which is some going for a couple of newbies. After our first day of excitement Friday was a bit easier and more relaxing. Snow started to fall in earnest in the afternoon but we were all hoping the wind would die down so the snow stayed on the slopes. Into bed and asleep before my head hits the pillow.
The view from the summit chalet, where we had coffee and hot chocolate was pretty cool as you can see form the shot above. The boys had arranged once again to get out early and this time I actually made it out and up to the gondola before anyone else. I needed to buy a new lift ticket as we had only bought a 2 day pass originally, not sure how we'd go. The others rolled up, about 12 of us all up I think, and we boarded the gondola after a short wait in the largest crowd we'd seen so far, each day it had been steadily building. Once at the top there was not much hesitation by the leaders of the group, we walked on over the the north side, near the Duncan Express chair lift and popped on our skis. At that point I looked at the sign indicating our run and noticed the black diamond. I said 'You guys are kidding right?' to which the response was 'Don't worry about it, you're a good skier, you'll be fine'. Now compliments I can take, keep feeding my ego please, but maybe it's less about how good I am and more about 'this looks awesome, let's do it, I'm sure Andy wont die... much'. Well there's not much to do but suck it up and try to get down alive. It was steep to a newbies eyes, really steep. I wasn't so worried about the snow, and there was plenty of it with over a foot of fresh powder, if I fell it wasn't doing to hurt much assuming that I stopped before hitting a tree or cleaning up another skier. My main worry was being able to make my turns and lose speed in the deep snow on a steep slope. The guys were great, especially Kent and Predrag who stayed around me to ensure that I was okay. I fell 3 or 4 times and lost my skis a couple of times but I made it down pretty well and got up alot of speed in a few places. It was actually a lot easier just to go fast and hammer through/over the forming moguls than to try to cut too much and keep speed lower. By the end of the run I was drenched in sweat and my heart was hammering pretty hard, as much from the effort as from the adrenaline rush. It was pretty cool. Kent and I then headed back to the summit and then down to the village via another long blue run to get together with our kids who had called us on our cells nagging us to come get them and take them out for a run. I grabbed the whole family and left Kent to the harder runs so that we could get Cam and Abs up to speed on the mountain.
We did four more runs that day. Cam did 3 runs and almost killed himself on the north side when he face planted after letting himself get too much speed on a steep section. He has a beauty of a graze down his nose from hitting the snow and ice, but if he hadn't bailed he would have been into the trees at, I reckon, over 40kph. He was understandably upset for a few minutes but got back on the horse and made it down again. Not only that he wanted to do it again so we headed off down the north side again and had a great run with no major incidents. After taking to chair back up to the top again it was clear that Cam was pretty done, tired and sore, so Jo took him back down in the gondola leaving me and the girls to do one last run down the south side. I was really proud of both of them, they set a great pace and we got some good speed down to the village, passing pretty much everyone else on the way. The evening ended with a slap-up meal in Mishco and Liz's room, a smörgåsbord of all our left-overs, some laughs (mostly about who had taken the biggest and/or most falls) and again had a fairly early night.
We drove back to Oakville in the morning, pretty sady to leave, another day would have been nice. After another 7 hour drive arrived to find our house under a foot of snow. My rest and SuperBowl Sunday had to wait until I cleared all the snow, but luckily by buddy Garry showed up to watch the football with me and bent his back to help shovel the snow. Later that night, after the Giants had beaten the Patriots in a nail-bitting last quarter, Jo and I finally crashed out for good, the kids long gone to nod. Skiing is pretty great, and being able to do it as a family was lots of fun. I think we'll do some more this season, I definitely want to take a lesson or two, and maybe if we're still here next season we can find some bigger mountains. The Rockies are only a 3 hour flight away....
Andy, out.
