MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2021

38 • • • On our second day, we’re treated to a full day of cat skiing on Mont Porphyre. The cat ride up is a bumpy but fun ride with 10 of our new best friends. Our guide, Camille Hudon, tells me she works in the hospital during the summer as an emergency physician. Our other guide, Benjamin, looks to be about 21 but tells me he’s a mechanical engineer in the real world. Everyone we meet has a fascinating story. The two forty-somethings tell me they’re originally from France and love speed flying. Another guy in the cat grows recreational cannabis in Maine. And everyone can really ski. Dropping in on one of Porphyre’s many runs, most of them named after Guillaume’s prolific prodigy (he has five kids), it’s a steep drop, a few quick turns and you’re into it: deep snow that goes on and on and on. While the trees are still tight, the grade of the slope and the quality of the snow make it an incredible descent. We whoop and holler through the trees and I’m surprised the guides aren’t worrying about losing us. But the guides are casual compared to their western counterparts; we do have avy gear, but there are no run-throughs on how to use it. We do five laps on Porphyre before skiing back down to the cat where it takes us across the valley and up Mont Miller for one sunset glory run back to the bar. It’s one of my best runs of 2020 (that is a compliment). • • • On our final day of skiing, we take a short but cold snowmobile ride with some rippers over to Mont York. Another of Guillaume’s skiing tenures, there is a ton of skiable terrain here, all of it steep tree skiing that is not for the beginner. We trade out the sleds for skins and start touring. Our young guides are absolute animals when it comes to ski touring; they prefer the SFU (Straight Fucking Up) technique to the switchback method I favour. But we get three laps in and watching these guys shred down the mountain is an absolute pleasure. My skiing isn’t nearly as pretty, but the runs are well-spaced. There’s tons of snow for fresh tracks and it’s a real hoot skiing with these guys. • • • That night, it’s one of the staff’s birthdays. They all dress up in camping attire and party ‘til the wee hours. We know all of them now. And to my mind, that’s the telltale sign of a great ski hill: one where you spend a few days and even the locals know your name by the time you leave. While we did spend three days skiing in the Chic Chocs, it feels like we barely touched the place. We only walked from our hotel to the ski hill, skied Mont Miller, Mont Porphyre and Mont York. That’s all we did. We ate every meal at the Mont Miller chalet (it’s pretty much the only place to eat). We didn’t check out the true alpine of the Parc National de la Gaspésie, nor the ski town of Sainte-Anne-Des-Monts. We still have no idea what it’s like over that way. But that’s just the way travel is, isn’t it? There’s never enough time and there’s always more to see. Going to the Chic Chocs is no longer on my skiing bucket list. Going back to the Chic Chocs is. chic-chac.com