Through the light snow, I went out of Ste.-Adèle, in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec, and we headed to Prévost, eight miles away. Just a few minutes earlier, I had come out of the AU Clos Rolland, a historic inn where I had spent the night before dinner at a three -course decadent meal and resting from a day of endurance skiing.
Ski from the city to city through the forests and the meadows, then at night near the trail in relative luxury, was something I had never experienced in North America.
The AU Clos Rolland is only a few squares from the P’Tit Train du Nord, a former rail line that was converted into multiple paths covered for strength skiing. My driver and I slipped it for a few minutes before we got into the woods in the strait, with no Whizzard Trail care. There the real fun began.
For the last two days I have been watching the eastern route of Les Routes Blanches, a new series of ski tours on the huge Network of Scandinavian trails in southern Laurentians, many created a century ago. There are three options. The 28 -mile route I have connected three small cities within three days, with two nights near the trail, luggage meals and luggage (about $ 700 per person, double occupation). Skiers can go with a guide, as I did, or try it on their own (about $ 42 for maps and parking, accommodation and meals are additionally). The north route, based in Mont Tremblant, includes two days of skiing on expert trails. On the west west west 32 miles, skiers are currently responsible for booking a Yurt and a backcountry cabin. The next winter trips will be offered.
I also have my own story in the area. I learned to downhill when I was 5 in a former resort called Gray Rocks. My German immigrant parents loved the area so much, bought a cottage that my mom sold when I was 13. I live in Colorado, but the Laurentians still pull my heart, a soft tug that is impossible to ignore.
The pioneer trail manufacturers
The Laurentians have been a ski destination since the beginning of the 20th century.
In the late 1920s, a Norwegian immigrant and greedy skier, Herman Smith-Johannsen, known as Jackrabbit, moved to Shawbridge, making a productive designer of the backcountry trails. He promoted the idea of a trail that would parallel to the existing train line and allow skiing between cities and volunteers to clean it. The Maple leaf trail was opened in 1933.
The parts of this path still exist, as are other trails from the time. But their awareness fell, especially after the completion of Laurentian Autoroute in 1959 and people began to lead to the slopes instead of taking the train.
Now, Les Routes Blanches is changing this.
Through the forest and a shower
On the first day of my tour, it started at the P’tit Train du Nord Trail, which was quickly turned off on a no -care path, was written with pieces of a few skiers.
My driver, Will Hotopf, and I would follow paths like this whole day. I had rented a Scandinavian outfit in Val-David, where we started. Unlike the cross-country ski I use at home, they were slightly wider and had metal edges for better control and maneuvering.
We passed past thick deer shrubs before slipping along the rolling stock through the eastern white pine and red cedar. A detour led to a lean-to-top a knoll, where I looked out in Mont Alta, a former alpine ski area that now opens in skiers who want to climb the power of their own squares to ski down.
Although the trail ran near the outskirts of Val-David, the city looked very far away. “You feel like you’re in the desert, but you’re not at all,” Mr Hotopf said.
The yin-yang of existence in the backcountry, but near Creature Womins integrates the appeal of Les Blanches Routes. Sometimes we were seemingly deep in the woods, all on our own. Other times, we made cracking of houses and courtyards, the smell of tobacco that beats our noses. Occasionally we crossed roads. However, we only saw a handful of other skiers.
After my trip, I talked to Jean-François Girard, a guide to Montreal, who pioneered the idea of Les Routes Blanches.
In 2009, he had discovered the paths for day trips. “I was excited by these paths,” he told me. “And I lost on them sometimes.”
He began to investigate them and was soon inspired to revive the ski tradition in the city. Mr Girard found a partner at Sopair, a non -profit organization dedicated to the maintenance and development of the trail in the area, which now oversees LES routes.
When I Sky I Sky, Les Routes Blanches, who just started this winter, was still so new that Mr. Hotopf stopped occasionally to place the directional signs on the trees. A well -labeled junction led to the Gillespie trail, built by Gault Kerr Gillespie, another trail manufacturer in the 1930s. In the early 1920s, Gillespie and his brothers will ski at school and their journey was on a part of this path.
Late in the afternoon, we were in a frozen lake, passing through places where residents had cleared small ice rinks from their docks. The violation of a sharp slope at the end of the lake brought us to the Mustafa trail and another detour to the top of the top. A monochrome landscape spread under us as the light faded.
Less than half an hour later, and just more than nine miles from the starting point of the day, I clicked from my skiing at the Far Hills Resort Hotel on the outskirts of Val-Morin, where he waited for a warm shower.
Trips in time skiing
I woke up in four inches of new snow, which pushed everything into the woods as we started to face the 12.4 mile route of the day. Prolonged copper and faded golden beech leaves emphasize dark green conifers. Occasionally the snow would fall from a cedar branch, like a soft exhaustion. If this was a forest bath, it would be a cold dip.
Soon we hit the Legacy Maple Leaf Trail, where I was transferred to a previous time, in which I fell in love with the skiing in a landscape like this and felt welcomed in the culture of Quebecos, where there is an intelligence and my surname is pronounced without the “” “”
Although I got the cell service almost all the time, I was still feeling disconnected for these few days, as if it were in a snow bullet.
We were passing five lakes that day. By turning the ice covered with snow, I imagined that I was living in one of the beautiful houses of the lake that marked the coastline. In Lac Lucerne, Mr. Hotopf mentioned Emile Cochand, a Swiss immigrant who founded the first Canada ski school, along with trails, near this point in the late 1910s. At Lac Deauville, we are pique on a floating dock inaugurated.
Towards the end of a long, slightly rolling origin, we stopped in a refuge in a liquidation, heated by a wood -burning stove, then stumbled upon the P’Tit Train du Nord for the last 2.5 miles in the city.
Ski is life
At dinner that night at AU Clos Rolland, I learned more about the trails from James Jackson, the chairman of the Sopair Board of Directors. His wife, Rebecca MacDonald. And Chris Schlachter, a skier.
Mr Jackson described the Routes Blanches work as “joining the courtyards” throughout the area. Some of the routes have been lost in development or new property owners who no longer access access to trails that cross their land. “What we would like to reach is that land owners want the path on their land,” Mr Jackson said.
The last day’s route included the climb of Sommet Olympia, a hill of a hill. We placed the climbing skins on our skis to climb the slope, then we dipped the back, following the Whizzard path. Eventually, we reached another part of the P’Tit Train du Nord, shadowing a final mile, and then finishing steps from the Microrasserie Shawbridge, where we were waiting for the opportunity to celebrate with beer in space.
But first, more skiing. The snow sparkled in the sun. The barren trees formed a backdrop of dark lines that go in the way. Johannsen, the rough pioneer, perhaps considered me soft for the ski experience I just had. And I wouldn’t question it. There is something to be said about its stamina. Lived to be 111. I will gladly take a shorter life span as I can ski to the end.
