Morzine's high season is now. Not spring, not summer, when all French people worldwide take their long vacation break, but now, right now, during the six week period of school winter holidays. Most people think of it as a ski resort and because it has many mixed-level skiing venues, families descend here from the end of January through the first week of March en masse. To ski.
The pace is incredible. You see kids, parents, babies even, clunking through town in heavy ski gear, walking sprightly toward the east gondola or the west gondola to reach the ski runs high up in the mountains, guaranteed to have snow now, even though the town itself has long lost its white stuff. Trails are groomed and ready. Including several sets of cross country trails, but never mind those -- people live and breathe down-hill skiing here.
So why haven't I skied at all in the last three days?
I'm here for six full days (five down, one to go) and after the first two, I stopped skiing. It's weird for me to be in a ski resort and choose, for three days now, not to ski.
What's my excuse? Oh, everything! But mostly, I have grown pretty unfond of down hill skiing (too crazy, too mechanical, too loud, too repetitive!). As for cross country -- it's too limiting! In a way that hiking is not. In fact, it's because I find this place to be so beautiful, so amazingly beautiful, that I took this break from skiing. I want to see everything! I want to hike to obscure corners. I don't want to be hamstrung by ski trails that create boundaries for me.
Believe me, I torture myself over this every morning! It's my last chance to ski this winter! I should go out on the trails!
Then the other side speaks up: I've done two of the three clusters of Nordic trails already. I should take the stunning hike stunning mademoiselle at the hotel desk suggested. And I should actually go up to THE lake, the one I missed by accident yesterday. And I could go back to the set of trails I hiked yesterday, but instead of turning left, I could explore going right -- that leads right into Switzerland. Wouldn't that be cool?
Today's tortured back and forth lasted until breakfast. In the end, I opted for the magnificent walk suggested by my hotel. They really know their stuff. If they rave about it, it must be good.
So I eat the cooked breakfast again. Today they are offering an egg coquotte, which appears to be soft baked and served on some mushroomy custard. Yum. And of course the croissant, always the croissant!
Now, how do I get to this magnificent walk? Again, I have to learn a completely new set of mountains. I am to take the bus to Les Gets -- a village on the other side of the mountain to our east. From there, I take yet a different gondola up the mountain even further east. Do you see how one might get confused?
I arrive at the bus stop a few minutes early. Well that's okay! There's a pastry shop near the stop. I can go hang out there and drool.
And do some people watching at the bus stop. All nonskiers.
At Les Gents, I take the Mont Chery gondola up to pick up the trail there along the ridge, all the way to Mont Caly. It's at a medium elevation of about 1500 m (about 5000 feet). The hike trail has some inclines, but honestly, nothing that will make you really pant. Well, except for the views: they will make you sweat from excitement!
The highlight is, of course, the direct view onto Mt Blanc. So let's start there.
And to the left...
And to the right...
A short way into the hike, I pause to watch an orange squirrel catching water from melting snow, which only happens on this side of the ocean (orange squirrels are something out of my childhood in Poland)...
I'm not the only hiker here, but there is enough spacing that you never feel you're sharing a crowded path. And once you leave the ski gondolas, chairs, and t-bars, the quiet sets in. And Mt. Blanc, now in a haze, which only adds to the drama of this highest Alpine peak (at 4808 m, or 15,774 ft), tracks your progress and sends encouraging signals of Alpine comfort and yes, peace.
I set up the camera for a selfie. But there's an issue: I'm wearing sunglasses. You have to! On a sunny day the glare is something else! That means my glasses are off and I cannot see anything under my nose. I can see the mountains, I can't see my camera screen. In setting up the selfie on a timed release, I press buttons from memory. And I end up pressing the wrong buttons. As a result, the world for the next five photos will be presented to you in... Sepia!
When I reach Mont Caly (the next summit after Mont Chery), I see an arrow pointing down to the hamlet, suggesting a restaurant. It's only noon and I am not especially hungry, but you know how I love sitting outside in the mountains over a dish of this, or a cup of that!
Madam suggests a swing chair. Madame reads my mind well. I tell her I'll have something sweet. What's this? They have a home made wild blueberry tart?
You're probably wondering if these are local blueberries. They are. Each restaurant bakes their tart differently -- some cook the berries lightly, others put them on a sponge layer, this one places the berries, which would have to have been been frozen, on a splendid tart shell. All these tarts have been wonderful, down to the last berry. (Today I drink blueberry soda.)
Fortified, I make my way back to the gondola.
I'd put on my glasses and discovered my camera sepia mistake, so we are back to regular tones now!
I could just catch the bus back to Morzine, but I have another idea: why not stay in Les Gets (it's pronounced simply zhe, not ghets, or ghe, or goat or whatever, which I realized after I kept asking about Get and getting nowhere). Why not walk over to the west side and take that gondola up that mountain! Here's the brilliant thing about that plan: I will then land at the Les Chevannes mountain ridge. You wont remember it, but I do! On my first day here, I skied over to it, coming from Morzine. It's where I found my first outdoor cafe on this trip. It's where I sipped my apricot juice, being much less savvy then about all the blueberry wonders floating around here.
As I stood in the short line for the gondola, I saw that right next to it, there were a few other skiing options, accessible by chairlifts (so going only halfway up the mountain). And this is where I had my epiphany: the reason I like Morzine so much is because it has no chair lifts, t-bars or other moving machines, with ski slopes carrying you right to the streets of the village. There is only one run down the mountain into Morzine (the one I skied). All the rest of the skiing (so, like 99% of it) takes place at higher elevations. Accessible only by these various gondolas.
And that's a good thing! I see what has become of down hill skiing: it's gone crazy. It's not about long mountain runs into town, through forests and past meadows. It's treeless spaces with countless skiers and in case you're not already overwhelmed by the activity, by the magnitude of the mechanical operation, by crazed skiers going way too fast on skis and snowboards, there's music! Loud pop or rap or something, pulsing at you, making more noise. I saw it at Avoriaz, I see it in Les Gets. It used to be a feather in your hotel cap if you could say that you can ski in and out from the back door of where you're staying. But these days, it seems to me it would be hell to be that close to ski runs. It's so much better to take that noise, that craziness and put it up into the mountains, though I do feel for the animals who surely had to flee once the people on skis showed up with their chaos.
So, I like Morzine, indeed, I love Morzine, because it has taken its skiing and tucked it away. I like the ski destination because you cant really see the skiing from where I'm staying!
This sort of begs the question: why come to a ski resort at all? Why not just find an Alpine valley with your little Alpine hotel and lots of Alpine trails to tempt you?
Well because. There are some trappings of humanity that are nice. The trails, even the walking trails, are mostly groomed. It would be otherwise difficult to do mountain hikes in deep snow or on icy surfaces. Ed and I have a hard time hiking back home in March because everything is dangerously slippery. Here, the snow is deep, but it's packed down hard for you. I saw yesterday that once you left behind the groomed trails, you needed snow shoes to make any progress at all. A groomed hiking trail is a benefit of a ski resort that I like. (As is the food of Alexandre here, as is the sweet honey store that I visited, to say nothing of the toy store, and the patisserie.)
And because there are people, there is, too, terrific public transportation. No one wants to see cars clogging the little village streets. In fact, no skiers use cars here. They leave them for the week, or two weeks and they move around on foot, on gondolas, and on buses.
Let me finish my hike though! Because I am like the bunny that keeps on rat-a-tat-tatting that drum! The weather is stunning, I am on the trail, taking me not too far from the ski trail of my first day.
I hike it all the way to my gondola number 1, the one that carries me right back to the heart of Morzine.
... where I think I should eat something other than a blueberry tart. How about a vegetable tartine? (Grilled, with fantastic cheese.)
It's evening way too quickly! I don't mean that it gets dark fast, though that's definitely true: the sun disappears early and the cool air takes hold once again. (Did you notice that on my hikes, I was down to no gloves, no cap and no jacket? The sun was that warm!) I mean that the day flies by so very quickly.
The appetite stirs. Which is good, because at 7:30, I go down to dinner. Today there's lamb, which I unfortunately like very much, but would never order myself (because eating veal and lamb feels extra not right to me, even though I do understand that I have not always been consistent with my attitude toward meat: it's like skiing -- I'm not necessarily opposed to it, I just have a hard time overcoming the mounting objections to it). I'll just post a pic of the cheese course: I chose two of my favorite Savoie cheeses: a Beaufort and the Reblechon.
Let me end as I seem to always want to end these days -- with thoughts running to the Ukrainians who know anything but peace right now. On my last gondola ride, I was in a cabin with a German family. Two teens and parents. The dad said a lot about Putin and the Ukraine. I speak no German and so I understood none of it, (except for the words Putin and Ukraine), at the same time that I understood all of it. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his tone. I can't tell you how strange it felt, this unspoken bond there in that cable car with a German family, on the subject of war. How strange, but also gratifying.
The moon shines so very brightly over Morzine tonight. May it soon shine brightly over the people of the Ukraine. Over all of us.
With love...
