Tremblant

I simply ski better at Tremblant. 

There's always room for improvement in this sport, especially if you took a thirty year hiatus, like I did, and come back to it at forty-five. In the years since (and there have been more than a few), I've made decent headway, cutting a better and better figure on the advanced intermediate trails at the northern Vermont mountains where I usually ski.  But at Tremblant, I can handle the black diamonds.

It's not what you might think.  At this big, meaty mountain in Quebec's Laurentians, they don't mark the trails on the curve; they don't make you feel good by slapping a black diamond designation on runs that other resorts would stick with a pawky blue square, the universal mark of the middling in ski territory.  Tremblant's expert trails are real enough, and so is the satisfaction you get from carving a smooth, tight turn at speed, or from landing upright and in control after launching off a sudden drop in the middle of a run.  No, those diamonds aren't just a participation prize for the over-fifty crowd.

Mt. Tremblant is the highest peak in the Laurentians, that billion-year- old mass of granite that rises some ninety miles north of Montreal. At just under 3,200 feet, it's not all that lofty even by eastern North American standards, but it stands just enough apart from the range's other peaks to create the illusion of far greater height - and to offer magnificent summit views, especially to the north, that are no illusion at all, but a confirmation of the vast and wonderful boreal emptiness that lies between here and the northern reaches of Quebec.  What Tremblant lacks in daunting altitude, though, it makes up for with a splendid variety of terrain, with a challenging use of the mountain's available steep grades, and with grooming that makes the most of an annual average 150-inch snowfall.  It is that superb grooming, along with black-diamond trails that can be hellaciously steep yet wide enough for executing turns with panache even when you aren't an Austrian Olympian, that is the secret of why I ski better at Tremblant.  I love my old Vermont downhill haunts, but there's been many a time when I've wished their best expert trails were wider than my skis are long. 

Tremblant is one of the oldest ski resorts in eastern North America.  Its origins date to 1938, when the legendary American broadcaster and globetrotter Lowell Thomas ascended it on skis fitted with free-heel cable bindings, and sealskins that prevented backsliding.  Thomas was accompanied by a Philadelphia millionaire named Joe Ryan, whose first thought on reaching the summit - aside from skiing down - was to render such an arduous climb unnecessary by installing a mechanical lift.  The following year, he did just that, laying the foundation of eastern Canada's premier ski destination.  Over the coming decades, he had the help of Thomas, who never failed to slip a good word for the resort into his broadcasts and articles, and of Herman Smith-Johannsen, aka "Jackrabbit," the Norwegian skiing pioneer who spent the latter part of his 111-year-long life popularizing the sport and helping to lay out ski trails and organize competitions throughout the East.  (On a 1981 visit to a Montreal area cross-country skiing center managed by Johannsen's daughter Alice, I met the grand old man in the lodge; when I asked him if he still skied, he said that yes, he got out on his cross-country skis several times a week, but confessed that "I don't ski as well as I did a hundred years ago."  He was 105 at the time, and was no doubt the only man in the world who could have said that with a straight face and not the slightest trace of exaggeration.)