Skiing with a Difference

So, imagine this.

An early rise, the snow outside silencing even the occasional twitter of a bird perched in half-sprayed trees, the double relief when your breath doesn’t fog your eyes with cold mist and your feet finally reach the under-floor heated timber. The scent of breakfast hastening your ablutions before you sport your carefully colour co-ordinated outfit and set down to join your party in a light-flooded room hewn from antique pine. You don your boots, your skis, and you make way for the mountains, stripped with white corduroy ridges from the early morning piste-ing machines that sweep the slopes deep and crisp and even. Then, as you reach the top, you decide on your manner of descent. Depending on your skill, veteran or novice, you either tumble down, Toddler-like, or swish down, Bond-like, to reach the bottom. Then there’s all that stuff in between the top and the bottom, of course, that middle bit called ‘skiing.’

Alpine skiing, often called simply ‘downhill skiing’ is somewhat of a misnomer in this regard. Let’s begin to imagine again.

We’re in any one of connected ski areas from Les Trois Vallees to Les Deux Alpes and La Grave. And let’s go back to that middle bit, that going ‘downhill’ bit. Those unexploited, under-populated stretches where the ground is calm and the sound is one of resounding silence. Tracks of a fox, or lynx or wolf leading into the scattered enclaves of tall pine. The sight of an impossible panorama, a photo-stitch of all the winter-scene postcards you’ve ever received laid end to end, encircling you. Mont Blanc in its looming magnificence, the face of the Petit Dru rising from the Chamonix valley, you with some wood strapped to your feet in the midst of it all, small, tired, and hungry. Lunch is but the slight tug of gravity away. You, your friends and family are welcoming by the smells of food cooking on a wood burning stove emanating from a chalet perched - as you all are - on the precipitous slopes, levelled by long tables and a log fires. The orgy of indulgence needn’t stop there. Wearisome limbs are replenished with jets of a hot tub, the hands of a masseuse, the swill of a cocktail and the indiscriminate banter. Back in the chalet, you guiltily clutch some vino in one hand, a book in the other while a fine evening meal is being prepared for you. There are the bars and cafes in the village that will entice you out later, and your inviting bunk to tempt you later still.

All a little too romantic? Generic even? Better surely than simply going downhill.

Try igoski.co.uk for ski weekends in the French Alps.

Try Alpine Elements for ski holidays in the French Alps.