Mont Tremblant - January 27, 2024

Three weekends ago, my friends and I headed to Tremblant for a one-night mini ski trip! We had rented a ski-in/ski-out condo, and it was our first time staying overnight at the resort. We left Ottawa at 5:30am, hoping to arrive at the hill before opening. Temperatures were forecasted to be in the range of -2 to +2C all weekend long, making for some of the best conditions we've ever seen at the resort!

We arrived at 8am, and parked at the base of the Porte de Soleil chairlift. After gearing up, we boarded the lift, and skied down to the village base, where we picked up our lift tickets. 

The plan for this weekend was to explore as many gladed runs as possible, as none of us had ever been to Tremblant with snow conditions this good! The region had received a large dump of snow in mid January, with more smaller amounts of snowfall throughout the following week, and most notably had not received the freezing rain that the Ottawa region had suffered from! 100/102 trails and glades were open, the highest amount I had ever seen. 

After arriving to the top, our first run was on the Soleil side, where we were able to ski through the intermediate La Jamme glades and end up at the elusive Cabane a Sucre, nestled between the trees.  

After a few more runs on the Versant soleil, we headed to our favourite terrain pod: Versant Edge, known for its low crowds, good snow, and some of the best tree skiing in the region! We had previously visited this area in late March 2023, though most of the runs were either closed or extremely icy, so we had yet to experience its most notable terrain. I led the group to the double diamond Emotion, known to be one of Tremblant's steepest glades, and though extremely steep and full of large moguls, the run was totally doable as long as it was taken slow, with calculated turns. After having gotten the steepest glade out of the way, we enjoyed the gladed runs Haute Tension, Reaction, and Extension (which ranged in difficulty from double black to blue). Snow conditions here were even better than Emotion, with only a few patches of thin cover in the form of roots, but at least those were not rocks! The base was deep, snow was soft, and there were even some patches of fresh powder along the far edges of the run boundaries!  

Returning to the base of the Edge Chairlift, we met up with my friend from Montreal, who would be joining us for the rest of the day, and did one more lap of the steep Emotion glade, though this time cutting to the left halfway through to hit Reaction.  

By this time, it was around 1:30pm, and we were feeling tired and hungry, so we headed into the North side lodge to grab some food! Despite lines having been 20-30 minutes long across most lifts (Soleil, Duncan, Gondola, TGV, Expo) that morning, their length seemed to drop dramatically after 1pm, and our final two hours of skiing were spent with minimal lift lines. My friends wanted to hit the infamous Dynamite (known as the steepest tree-cut run on the East), but unfortunately its steepest cliff/frozen waterfall section was closed, so we were only able to ski the upper part, before crossing over to Expo, though I was never planning to ski the closed portion had it been open anyways!!! Despite some steeper runs such as Expo and Cossack being decently scraped off at this time of day, the ice was soft due to the warm temps, making it easy to dig my edges into them.  

The last gladed run of the day was off the Lowell-Thomas chairlift, where we explored the misty Archipel haut and bas areas.

By 3:30pm, my friend left to bring his vehicle from a distant parking lot to the main lot, as we would meet up for food later, and those of us staying the night decided to do one more half-run on Kandahar, which had zero visibility but decent snow, followed by Beauvallon Haut for a final top-to-bottom run all the way to our airbnb, accessed by the lower cruiser Desseres. 

We then enjoyed a night walk through the beautifully-lit village, and grabbed some food at Le Shack, before returning to our condo to relax before another exhausting, but beautiful, day of skiing!