Lost and Hungry in Chamonix

Comment Share Posted on Sunday January 10th at 4:23 a.m. Tweet

The first installment of installing myself in France

How did I get here...

The short version/important part:

Finished uni! 4 A's and a B in my last semester, I'll be a qualified natural resource engineer once I've done some more practical work.

Moved out of my flat, sold two pairs of skis, two surfboards, my car, bike, firesticks, furniture, some ski gear, clothes and more to make mission money.

Flew to Europe on December 8th, turned up in Chamonix with $600 NZD after buying my season pass (300 Euro, which can buy about as much as $300 NZD can in NZ).

Lucked into a sweet house with some kiwi friends (Pete Oswald, Jono Willis, Andrew Sanders, Kate MacKenzie and Michele Monteath), met a bunch of cool people over here and managed to get a job fixing and tuning skis in a shop just down the road even though my French leaves a lot to be desired (such as not having slept through it in 3rd form and quitting it in 4th form).

Had some sweet skiing at the incredible mountains over here, awesome terrain and snow quality but early season so not much base and lots of rocks, the current storms are dealing to that though.

Scored one of the sickest powder days of my life on one of my days off and went shredding with my roomie Pete Oswald. Aired a wee drop on the way to a chute line that we wanted to ski and came out with pace, hit a piece of old avalanche debris under the snow and exploded, full on rag doll yard sale. Bruised my ankle bone from the impact.

Back on skis two weeks later, just worked and partied lots in the mean time (and played with my favourite new gears and did some sweet sewing check the photos!), but way more stoked to be back on snow. I'm meant to begin the Freeride World Tour Qualifying circuit at the start of Feburary so fingers crossed for that...

Had another couple of sweet powder days but got too excited to get the camera out much, backflipped my first cliff for the season though and started to find some lines that help Chamonix live up to its reputation as a big mountain mecca.

Also I found out that I'm ranked 15th on the Freeride World Tour website at the moment which is pretty sweet, but only because the important competitions haven't been yet and I came 3rd in the New Zealand Series. The top 30 or so guys from last year haven't started competiting yet though so if I'm still ranked in the top 40 at the end of the season I'll be stoked. Check it out on http://freerideworldtour.com/en/rankings/rankings_0-18 since I'm gonna claim the shit out of it while it lasts haha

Longer version yarns:

A list of things that French are into (and not into):

Really fucking random houses with low beams everywhere and bidets in different rooms to the toilet. Bunks that fold out of the wall and block the door into the room. 15 steak knives and no butter knives. Letterboxes inside apartment blocks locked doors. A huge landing next to a small bedroom. Two ensuit bathrooms but no communal one.

Wine (2$ bottles!) and cheese (not beer and pies)

Driving (not stopping at pedestrian crossings)

35 hour weeks and very long lunches- all the shops close from 12-2:30 but then stay open till 7.
Ignoring rules: road rules, rules of social conduct, its like they think of them as an optional extra for use in the case of someone having an issue with something. Dad told me that once and I understand it in all its hilarity now, and I like it. I also got the inspiration to come here from some photos of the mountaineering he did here in the 70's too, and have a lot more appreciation for how amazing it is now. Thanks Dad.

Skiing on groomed runs only and asking what your skis are so fat for/what is wrong with them when you're skiing on rockered skis because there is 50cm of fresh.

Generally being a lot more awesome and nice than everyone told me they would be, and blaming their bad reputation on people from Paris, which is apparently their uber extrememo version of the NZ vs Auckland rivalry.

Le premier yarn: Flying over here

Got to the airport in the rush that international travel always seems to cause no matter how long you have to prepare for it. Got told that my bags were 7kg over weight, and at $90 a kilo it was going to cost me $630 to get my ski gear to France. Unfortunately I only had $600 in my account. At this point I thought of a famous quote, though I forget from whom it originated (Einstein or Newton maybe?); ‘We don't have much money so we're going to have to think'. Or in this case, sweat.

With a little help from the crew present to farewell me (Si Reeves, Nat Vonloy and Blair Bowen) I managed to reduce the weight by donning my full ski kit. Wearing ski boots, ski pants, back protector, jacket, helmet and goggles on top of my normal clothes (plus the rest of my regular carry on luggage) I was ready to fly out of Chritchurch's almost 30 degree weather, to Dubai, where it was even hotter. Via Sydney and Bangkok, which weren't exactly freezers themselves. Also I had taken my metal ski bindings off my skis and put them in my pockets, which was somewhat of a topic of conversation at security. At every airport. It started to become like a comedy routine that I just kept running through- I would arrive at security looking like an overburdened and partially robotic Sherpa where I would be greeted by mildly amused looks of incredulous disbelief. After a process of unloading, explaining, examining and reloading I would continue on my sweaty way. The grand finale of this routine for me was Dubai where the following conversation ensued:

Turban wearing, gun toting and baffled security officer: What is this metal object from your jacket pocket that our X-ray picked up?
Me: It's a ski binding.
Security: What's it for?
Me: You put your ski boot into it. (I point at my ski boot)
Security: (Picks up ski boot, pushes toe piece of boot into toe piece of binding, which is not attached to a ski). Pauses. Says: What does that do?

Finally I made it to Zurich where I was picked up from the airport by ex-patriot fellow Canterbury Uni ski bum Alex Gatland (aka Chewy). A huge thanks goes to him here, he drove most of the way across Switzerland to pick me up, put me up at his house in Verbier for the night and then drove me to France the next day to drop me off in Chamonix. Also he let me use his shower to wash my 40 hour accumulation of $630 worth of sweat off. Absolute champion, don't know what I would've done without you bro.

Le deuxieme yarn: Christmas and partying over here (explanation stations):

Had Christmas here, missed my family a bit since I've been away for Christmas for a few years now, but made the best of it by stealing a Christmas tree from the side of the road where it was lying next to a rubbish bin as I walked home for lunch one day. On the way home with it I saw a young French guy that I work with at the ski shop and tried pretty unsuccesfully to talk to him (he speaks about as much English as I speak French). When I next saw him at work he explained to me with the aid of a translator that the tree I had was from his house- his mother had made him throw it out because she thought it was ugly. Beggars can't be choosers ay.

When I got home with the tree I realized I had forgotten my key. I decided to climb the three stories of exterior balconies to get to our apartment and left the tree in front of our door. This was at the time when my ankle was busted and so I was doing the climbing with one foot. I made it inside and discovered that my key didn't unlock our door from the inside and so I was now locked inside my own house, ambivalent to attempt the climb down with my bad ankle. Also I had left the tree in a position that blocked the door to someone else's apartment, and so I began to hear some loud swearing in French soonafter as our neighbours attempted to gain access to their own dwelling. Eventually I had to go back to work and so made the climb down which turned out to be easier than I expected, and quietly opened our door from the outside to hide my hard earned prize inside for my flatmates to find.

Christmas itself was a blast, I had to work but made the most of out 2.5 hour lunch break for family flat time and present opening (I got a sweet book from my secret santa). It turned out that there are heaps of Kiwis in Cham that we loosely knew some of and we invited a few over to eat with us. Some battled to find out place due to difficult directions and them being really high, which ironically was making them even more desperate to find our place so they could eat. It was for them that we coined the phrase ‘lost and hungry in Chamonix' (the title of this story of course!) which seemed to summarise the plight of the flightless kiwi on this side of the world. We partied well that night, and new years (the French are pretty mellow about fireworks randomly being let off in crowds which include children and old people), but skiing keeps wresting for control of my focus here.

Le troisieme yarn: Skiing over here

It's sick. So fucking good. And I'm not a man to throw profanities around Willi nilly. I don't think the photos do it justice. Although I've only skied 6 days I think 4 or 5 of them have been powder days, and my new Armada JJ's have been getting a workout and I love them so much!

One of my favourite skiing moments so far was where Pete, Ivar (our new Swedish skiing friend) and I went to the base of one of the sweetest chairlifts on a powder day but it was still on hold so we got on a slow and boring one next to it. Halfway up the lift we saw that the better chair had opened so we all jumped from the lift we were on, baffling the non english speaking woman on the lift with us. At the top of the sweet chairlift were about to drop into a steep, deep and forbidden (fenced off) looking line, right next to a ski patrol hut. All the ski patrollers came out of the hut and I thought they were going to tell us not to drop, so I yelled out 'is this OK?' The ski patrol just shrugged and kept looking- they'd just come to watch. I love France.

The entire valley is on one pass, which is technically 4 different resorts. Plus the Augille du Midi. I don't think you can really call it a resort, it's more like a gondola to a place where only expert mountaineers would ever see otherwise. It's the majority of the way up Mont Blanc, and you just can't possibly understand how big that is till you've seen it with your own eyes. I'm looking at it right now, it's the view from our balcony. I can't really describe how good things are here; the snow, the people, the culture, our crew, our house, the lines we've got to ski and the places we get to be. Yes, I am happy here.

It made me think, as I walked down the main street to get to work (which is unfortunately a bit of a fashion parade during the holidays), about trends and lasting impressions. This is one of the only places I've seen where park skiers with triple layered tall tees walk next to weathered old backcountry gurus with harnesses still on, both on their way back from the same mountain. The trends change, from fluro one-pieces in the 80's to bandanas and tall-top beanies now. But the skiing here seems to stay remarkably the same, dictated by the massively steep and gnarly mountains and glaciers that pour down into the cultural melting pot of Chamonix. Our entire culture seems bent on progression and ‘improvement', carrying an assumption that newer is better and that our generation is somehow superior to the last because the technology we have access to is more advanced. Genetically we're the same as people have been for thousands of years, the only difference is the environment that we've been born into. Why are we so bent on change? Were people desperately unhappy with how things were in the last few generations, and will our increasingly technological society make people happier in the future? I'm not personally against change or technology, but some things are good the way they are, and I'll be happy to see skiers making the same tight turns down narrow couloirs in Chamonix for years to come, no matter what they're wearing. So we went ski touring with some local friends that night (like hiking on skis), up a trail that many people had skied that day. It was just the same as many people had done before and it was an exciting adventure that I would definitely do again, and again. Yes, I am definitely happy here. Nothing needs to change.