Stoneham and Mont-Sainte-Anne: Two Superb Québec Ski Resorts

Québec City just may have the best suburban skiing in North America. 

Don't get the wrong idea.  We're not talking here about the kind of "suburban skiing" characterized by half a dozen trails, a couple of T-bars, and a place to get hot chocolate.  The provincial capital on the St. Lawrence is blessed with a pair of  first-rate resorts, each within a short drive of the city's legendary fortress walls, boasting impressive vertical drops, dozens of superlative runs for all skill levels, speedy lifts, and slopeside accommodations and dining.  But maybe "suburban" is the wrong word.  Stoneham and Mount-Sainte-Anne aren't just Québeckers' close-to-home secrets - they're ski meccas that stand with the best northeastern North America has to offer.

Putting my usual Vermont ski haunts behind me, I drove to Québec in late January for a taste of both resorts.  Scarcely more than a half hour after breakfast at my downtown hotel, I was twenty miles north and suited up for first tracks at Stoneham, where a light overnight snowfall had tossed three or four inches of fluff onto a nicely groomed packed powder base.  For a starter run, I chose La Gonnet, a meandering blue cruiser that spills down from Mountain 1's 1840-foot summit.  (Stoneham sprawls over four peaks, prosaically named Mountains 1 through 4; only 1, 2,and 4 are threaded with trails, while 3 may see development at some future date.) 

For readers who don't ski, or who haven't for quite some time, a "blue cruiser" is what used to be called an intermediate trail, back when everything was designated "novice," "intermediate," and "expert."  Today, the terms are "Easy, "Difficult," "Very Difficult," and "Extreme," marked respectively by a green circle, a blue square, a black diamond, and a double black diamond (one Vermont resort has a triple black, which I assume requires a parachute.)  La Gonnet, I discovered, was typical of eastern Canadian blues, interspersing long, gentle stretches with pitchier sections designed to whet an advanced middle-range skier's appetite for the black diamonds.  I picked up that gauntlet on my third run of the morning, heading over to Mountain 2's high-speed quad chairlift for a shot at a black called the Jacques-Cartier.  The Cartier, I was delighted to discover, exhibited another Canadian quirk, one I first noticed at Tremblant in the Laurentians.  Maybe it's just because Québec Mountains are bigger and broader than the ones New Englanders have carved ski areas out of, but the black diamond runs in La Belle Province are broader and thus more forgiving - with more room to turn, a sub-Olympian has a greater range of speed options.  (A sub-sub can carry this too far, leaving tracks that look like accordion pleats, but you get the idea.)  I handled the Cartier with what I considered reasonable aplomb, so much so that I hopped back onto the quad and went right back at it, this time getting cocky, sluicing more narrowly through the turns, and making just enough of a misjudgment on a slight bump to send me ... well, I think the technical term is "ass over teakettle." 

Chastened only slightly (it's great how modern bindings release at just the right moment) and completely undaunted, I spent most of the rest of the day on Mountain 4, nearly all black-diamond terrain, skiing with a Québec paper company executive and sometime Stoneham guide named Mark Drouin (I was skiing; Mark, one of the few adult converts to snowboarding you meet, was riding).  Like all of Stoneham's terrain, Mountain 4's blacks were superbly groomed, and the light weekday traffic had done little to scour the previous evening's powder from the surface.  I made no more skiless descents - but there were a few runs I was happy not to take.  One was a double black called "La Bomba," a name which I straightaway assumed had something to do with the nickname of Alberto Tomba, the high-living, hell-for-leather Italian Olympian of the 1980s.  I was right, and Mark told me the story.  "Tomba was here for a race," he explained as we rode the chairlift up Mountain 4, with the "Bomba" trail just to our left.  "He was his usual self - went out to dinner, took in a hockey game, then partied at a disco till the place closed.  He got to bed that night around four in the morning.  But at eight o'clock he was on that trail, and he won the race."