Val Thorens, France

A few months ago Jo, my flatmate Natalie's sister, sent out an email floating the idea of a week skiing in the alps. I, of course, jumped on board immediately. But what's a bit less common was being able to convince two close friends to make the trek with me. Tristan, my alpine amiga, and Tom, my old buddy from NY, both bought into this crazy idea. Tom even traveling all the way from New York!



In the end, there was no question for any of us that it was an unbelievable trip and worth any effort to get there.

Val Thorens is one of the major resorts in an area of the French Alps known as the Three Valleys. It's the highest resort town in Europe at 7545 feet. The highest mountain in Europe (Mt. Blanc - 15446 feet) isn't too far away, but it's not part of the Three Valleys. You can see a nice pic of the village of Val Thorens nestled between the mountains of the Three Valleys:



Anyway, the high altitude tends to mean that the snow will be more plentiful. Though apparently the snow in Europe has been gradually deteriorating over the past 30 years and people are starting to really worry about it. Is it global warming? Or just normal changing weather patterns? Who knows?!? This is making places like Utah and Colorado much more appealing - even to Europeans! Anyway, let's not get into an indepth analysis of the historical snow quality. You'll probably hear about enough of this during the Torino Olympics.

The trip was a package holiday where 12 of us arranged with Ski World to get a VERY early Saturday morning flight to Leon and a bus to the resort. We rented out a chalet in a building that had about 30 of these 12 person mini-houses. It was a very cool complex with a pool and sauna. Here's the view from out back porch. You can see our tracks on the left where we could ski down to the chalet!



Possibly the best part, though, was the cook, Jason. Jason the cook. He was great. He cooked for us! When I woke up in the morning, Jason was there scrambling eggs for me and handing me a cup of coffee to help with the hangover. When we got back after a hard day of skiing, Jason had set out fresh baked cookies and tea. Posh! And then at night, he'd come back (after winning some snowboarding competition, dude!), and cook us up a lovely dinner. It made the trip so much better not having to negotiate dinner plans with 11 other people. Funny how I fly all the way to the French Alps and end up talking about our Tazmanian cook most of the time. But it was definitely a huge bonus.

Oh, and we did ski a bit too. Actually, 6 days of skiing in a row. Clearly this was the most ambitious skiing attempt I'd been on, and I loved it. Being up there looking out in the alps about to fly down a wide open slope is a life changing feeling. And then being able to do it every day for 6 days...well...just makes you spoiled. I never wanted to leave.

I've got a bunch of crazy stories that I'll go through in the next post. But I'll leave here with pictures I took of how Tristan and Tom spent most of their time this trip.

Tristan on the ground...



...and Tom getting 5 feet of wicked air!!!



Good luck with the snow out there in the northeast! We could have used some of that in France!

Cheers!
Dan