Solo skiing – my first solo travel experience was up a mountain.

This is what skiing looked like in the late 60s.

This was posted January, 2010.

As you read this I am on the slopes of The Canyons, just outside of Park City, Utah. Planning this trip as a solo traveler took me back to my years of skiing growing up in Montreal and Ottawa.

When I was 10 years old I was skiing with my Mom on a beautiful spring day. Towards the end of the day I was going up the t-bar with her and she said “It’s starting to get icy. This will be my last run of the day”. It was her last run alright. Minutes later she broke both her legs and she never skied again.

Later that year we moved from Montreal to Ottawa and established a new winter tradition. My mother got every Saturday off while my father piled my three siblings and me into the huge chevy with the ski rack on the trunk and drove us to Vorlage, a tiny ski hill in the Gatineau Hills north of Ottawa.

On a rare occasion a friend from the city would join us but, for the most part, I made my way solo. Certainly my brothers wouldn’t ski with me and, just as certainly, I wouldn’t ski with my little sister. So I skied alone getting in lots of runs thanks to the single’s line.

This is me at Vorlage in the early 70s.

I started on the t-bar — a dicey choice because if you get on with someone who doesn’t know how to use it, you can be abruptly thrown off. So I quickly graduated to the chair lift. I met people and chatted all the way up. If they were French, I tried to speak French. If our skiing styles matched, we’d take a number of runs together – still taking the single’s line to max out our runs in the day. I remember enjoying the skiing and enjoying the meeting. In a sense, this is when I learned to travel solo.

After a day in the fresh air (skiing at 10 and 20 degrees below 0 was not uncommon), the day would end with my father finding me first, then sending me to get my brothers off the hill while he found my sister. I came to know my brothers’ skiing styles quite well. My gentle, quiet brother cut into the mountain aggressively. My “take on the world” brother was graceful on the slopes. That always struck me as odd.

After one or two promises of “last run”, the last run actually took place and they would finally leave the slopes. We would pile back into the Chevy, tired and happy, and quietly listen to “Live from the Met” on CBC radio on the way home.

Good memories!

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