Eastern Snowboarding

Mont Tremblant: On spring conditions and Labatt 50

As you can tell from my other post, I have returned from Mont Tremblant, the setting for my first real snowboarding excursion of the season. What follows is basically a mixed back about the Tremblant ski resort, the conditions, what I did, where I stayed and various other exciting stuff.

The resort

First, I must admit that Tremblant basically killed any desire I had to snowboard in Ontario ever again. Whereas I was generally okay with freeriding 500 or 700 foot hills in Ontario until now, discovering a huge mountain within a day’s drive of Toronto has convinced me that a couple of weekend Tremblant trips would be far better than individual day trips to central Ontario.

As I have mentioned previously, Tremblant is a pretty serious mountain; it has 13 lifts, almost 100 runs, and about 2100 feet in vertical drop. In fact, according to Yahoo, it has the highest vertical in eastern North America.

Now, only about 25% of the mountain was actually open when I arrived, thanks to this spell of warm weather across eastern North America. Fortunately, the resort still had several top-to-bottom runs open, so there was still a fair bit of terrain to ride. The conditions varied from icy to rocky, depending on the run; everyone I was with got some serious nicks in their boards. But everyone agreed they were just happy to be riding a decent hill.

Tremblant has the look and feel of a typical Intrawest property, with a few ‘Quebec-isms’ thrown in. The main village is really nice, featuring a varied selection of shops and restaurants; of course, it’s also really expensive, just like most other large resort. It’s certainly bigger than a place like Blue Mountain’s main village, but noticeably smaller than Whistler’s. And because you’re in Quebec, you can get service in English or French… and I think there was more beer available at lunch than juice. (Tip: if you want to look like a local, drink Labatt 50. Or ‘cinquante’ as we half-jokingly called it.)

With almost 100 runs, I could see Tremblant keeping any avid skier or rider entertained for quite some time. The impression I got (and what I heard from friends) was that some of the terrain closed included some incredible glades that took up most of one side of the mountain. This alone makes me want to return. None of the terrain I encountered was too difficult; even the beginners in our group could handle the black diamonds that were open fairly easily.

Thanks to the combination of warm weather, occasional fog and some rain throughout the weekend, there were virtually no lineups. Combine this with the fact the lifts at Tremblant are generally fairly quick, and the result was a hell of a lot of snowboarding. One frustration we continually encountered, however, was that lack of open runs forced beginners on to blue and black runs they should have otherwise avoided, leading to lots of dodging and close calls. But hey, I guess we were all there once.

Oh – and I only saw two riders all weekend with bandanas!

Mont Tremblant lodging and restaurants

This part will be a little thin, but I’ll put a permalink to the post so I can update it as I return. We were a group of eight, and stayed at the Tour Des Voyageurs hotel. We had a badass suite with two bedrooms, a huge ceiling, two bathrooms, a kitchen, TV, fireplace and three balconies. The hotel appeared to have free wifi, although each room had some sort of bizarre pay-per-day Ethernet hookup as well.

The best thing about this hotel was its location. It was in the middle of the village, literally three steps from the lift that took us to the base of the gondola. It had all sorts of shops, cafes and restaurants both inside the building and outside, meaning we didn’t have to walk far for anything. It’s not a luxurious hotel, but it does the job. And again, the location is phenomenal.

Because we basically had a house, we didn’t travel far to eat or drink much. We hit the local Casey’s, which was good and reasonably priced, and La Diable had some very good microbrew beers. I also visited my first French restaurant, like, ever: La Savoie. Turns out fondue is pretty good, but it also makes you smell like cheese. After dinner we headed to a store to pick up some beer, and the clerk certainly new what I had for dinner:

CLERK: Ahhh, you come from dinner at La Savoie, eh?
ADAM: Uh, yeah. How did you know?
CLERK (laughing): You smell like cheese!
ADAM: Well now, that’s highly embarrassing.
CLERK: Don’t worry. Everyone does when they leave. It’s like cigarettes.

Errr yeah.

The knee

Three days riding, no problems to report. I was very pleased about that.

Although the conditions sucked, we had an excellent time. It was good to ride a real mountain, and Quebec is a fun place. I will definitely return before the end of the year. This nice Burlington Free Press article on Tremblant provides some more colour on the place until then!

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