The grapevine tells me that Vermont, and pretty much the entire East Coast, got pounded with a lot of snow. Sources say two to five feet. That's pretty great. When I first heard the news I wondered if maybe I was cursed and that I should have stayed in the States a few more days to get the goods. Maybe. But then I thought about the past few days, skiing with Russ and Louise. The night we arrived, it was snowing really hard. Russ told us that when he left a week prior that there was no snow on the ground at all. In our yard there was at least two feet, almost three. But we arrived on a Wednesday and it had been snowing since Monday. It would be tracked out, bumped up, pretty much done. Nonetheless, we decided to get up early, buy our season passes, and salvage what we could of what must have been an epic storm. The passes were pretty easy to get accomplished as Silvia, and her twin counterpart Eleanora, both with matching modified Italian mullet haircuts, was very good with us as we stumbled our way through Italian, French, and English to get a red season pass, good for about a dozen resorts and only 800 Euros.
The tram ride up looked pretty promising with good snow cover on the steep chutes that lead down to Entreves. As it was our first day, we let Russ lead the way down to the Zerotta lift, staying on the pistes and ducking off at the very end when there was a wide open field that had a shocking number of tracks given that the real storm had occurred three days ago. Knee deep pow cushioned us as we made lazy arcs down to the lift. Even the life ride up revealed that under the chairlift, with a number of wide-open, easily-scoped lines were completely untracked. Completely untouched. I started to get worried. Maybe there was reason that there were no tracks. A cliff? Maybe some other hidden danger that we, as newbie American ski bums, didn’t know about. Russ didn’t know, and neither did Jean-Lucca, our new Italian friend, a self-described “free-rider.” Well, whatever. We’d find out soon enough. At the top of Zerotta, we took a winding piste choked with Brits snowplowing, Italian Maestri di Sci leading their tiny charges in a piste-border to piste-border S curve of death until we finally got a look at what we were dealing with. Courmayeur, at least that part that most people ski, is a massive alpine meadow, tipped up at about 25 to 30 degrees, south to southwest facing. About a zillion lifts service essentially the same pistes, so our prediction that it would be tracked out should have been right. Strangely enough, there were wide open areas that had no tracks on them, in plain view of the lifts, surround on all sides by hordes of vacationing Italians and Brits, determined to ski the ridges off the corduroy as fast as possible.
This was, by far, the greatest moment of culture shock in all my life.
For the rest of day we skied the most obvious lines that were covered in two to three feet of light Alpine blower. We tracked up the main meadow as much as we wanted, moving to another lift only as soon as it started to get heavy in the noon sun. Avalanche bombs boomed off the Mont Blanc massif as ski patrol prepped the upper mountain for opening. We moved off the main Checrouit face and over to the north facing Val Veny, skiing absurdly open trees with small cliff bands all day. On a whim, we decided to drop into the woods above the Zerotta lift and found four perfect chutes, tipped up at about 40 degrees and choked with blower. We though about hiding our tracks to the entrance but on our return run, we could see that no one had gone into them at all. In fact we had been skiing alone all day. And we hadn’t done anything that couldn’t be skied directly off a lift, with easy traverses or pistes directly back to the bottom. No hiking. No effort.
No way this could last.
The next day we set off early, aching slightly from all the skiing the day before. Skiing the icy groomers of Stowe all season hadn’t really prepared us for this. Patrol had finally opened the upper mountain, but the line was super long and we decided to head to the Gabba lift, another north facing area in the Val Veny. Our first run down was just as incredible as the day before, wide open trees with untouched powder all over the place. Riding up the lift, the same thing happened as the day before: we saw no tracks, no one skiing the trees, and we were far from the first ones on the lift. We skied the Gabba all day, stopping for lunch on a sunny terrace where we took off our hats, gloves, and jackets and sat down to a steaming hot lunch of tartiflette and beer, for 8 Euros. That’s about the price of a dry muffin and two hot chocolates at Stowe.
After lunch it was more of the same. And the next days we mined the same woods, only finding them slightly more tracked. Feeling adventurous, we took the second highest lift up, expecting to see the tracks from the hordes that had been lined up the day before. Not so. Apparently there was a well-battered (groomed) piste running down from the top, a solid intermediate cruiser run and not worth the half-hour wait in line anywhere else. Here, apparently, it was something special and had been skied into oblivion. However, the huge Alpine bowl just past the fence line, where the ski resort boundary ends, was pretty much untouched. We checked our beacons, dug a quick pit, and dropped in, taking a pretty conservative line, not knowing where we would end up if we went farther into the bowl. I know this is getting boring, but what the hell. I’ll tell you anyway. There was more powder. And it was easy to find first tracks. And the damn thing ended on a trail that we could ski down to the bottom of a lift. And it was really easy to ski another run. No hiking.
In the past week, we’ve skied only the most obvious lines we could find. We spent a day scouting some other lines farther up the Val Veny, lines that descend a beautiful Alpine bowl down into wide-open trees and end up on a road that goes right back to a lift where you can do it all again. Yesterday we skied the Dolonne drainage, which is lift-accessed, but is only skied with guides and their clients. The hardest part about the Dolonne drainage is picking a line. It’s only about the size of Mad River Glen, with a little more vert if skied from the very top. Oh, and the snowpack is also really, really good. No weak layers and about three solid feet of well-bonded powder, on top of a consolidated mass of hard snow. So maybe I’m not cursed after all.
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