Originally published 25 December 2017
Brevent ski area, Chamonix France, Christmas day, 2017
We headed out this morning for day 3 of our ski adventure. We walked down to our bus stop and got on the bus to head up to the lift we wanted to get on. After a while, I said to Laurie that I thought we had gone too far and I can’t figure out why we didn’t stop at the lift we wanted. Turns out we were on the wrong bus!
While a mistake, it wasn’t a major one. We intended to get off at Brevant and go to that resort. We instead got off at Flegere. While different resorts, on different mountains, they are connected by a cable car that goes from mountain to mountain. We intended to ski Brevant for a while then take the cable car to Flegere and finish the day there. Turns out we did it backwards. No biggie.
Flegere and Brevant have a large number of black and red slopes with a few blue (intermediate) and green. It’s extreme skiing at it’s finest with a lot of vertical…..you’re basically skiing down cliffs on the blacks. The reds here are considered upper intermediate. In the states they would be blacks. The blacks here would be double diamonds.
The knee brace that keeps me skiing, even though my knee isn't what it used to be.
Because of my knee surgery a few years ago, I wear a brace. I also am no longer allowed to run blacks (diamonds), gates (ski racing), or moguls. There were plenty of all three today….and with one exception….i didn’t do anything I wasn’t supposed to. I kept with my pledge to just cruise around and ski conservatively, and just enjoy being out here. I passed on the chance to run gates but I did think twice about it.
As for that exception……. It seems I made a tactical error in lift selection. We wound up on top with nothing but reds or blacks to bring us back down. I decided on what I thought was the lesser of the evils and we headed down the mountain. The run was what I would have considered a black diamond on the mountains I’ve skied in the states, and Laurie and I took our time coming down. We did fine, and our legs burned a bit afterwards. You know it’s steep when a chunk of snow from your last sweeping turn passes you. It was pretty much straight up and down.
Laurie was a trooper and we got to the bottom without even a tumble. I did hear about it though. Regardless, I was proud of her. When we got to the bottom, we boarded the cable car for our trip across to the other ski mountain, Brevant. Our legs were still tired from our excursion on the reds, so we took it easy and skied some gentle stuff for a while.
We decided to rest a bit and have lunch at an on slope restaurant. We were waited on by arguably the worst waiter in France. Brought the wrong stuff, put things on our bill we didn’t get, forgot drinks. He was friendly but that was about it. We finished lunch and went out to run the mountain a bit more before calling it a day.
In a sheltered area where the ridges wrap around
We skied all the intermediate stuff and they had an area where anyone could ski jump into a big air bag or run gates. I thought twice about running gates, but decided to keep to the “no gates, moguls, or diamonds” advice I received. It served me well as I’m still in one piece so I can ski our last day, tomorrow.
We topped off the day with a normal travel chore on our trips…..laundry! We went to one of the laudromats in the village, had coffee and pastry while the clothes washed, then got them together and headed home. We cooked in this evening and did our chores. Our clean laundry is packed and back in our cubes. One more day to ski……then we move.
We hope everyone had a great Christmas. We certainly did! Goodnight everyone. Chamonix slide show day four
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