“French bakeries are full of surprises, but this one might take the cake. After missing out on early morning crepes, Guillaume Arietta and I settled for these orange-infused fritters, pastries that in French roughly translate to ‘Nun’s Fart.’ Needless to say, it was the most delicious desert I’ve ever tasted.” Photo: Kade Krichko Words KADE KRICHKO Bouncing the expletive off his front windshield, Guillaume Arrieta shakes his head and bears down on the steering wheel. Until this point, the 30-year-old photographer has been all smiles, almost alarmingly optimistic considering the midwinter drought that has decimated snowpacks across Europe. But now something has changed, and as our van rises and falls with the undulating French countryside, I begin to fear our ski mission, and maybe even our lives, are in serious danger. Twisting a blonde, curly cue mustache, “I forgot the meat,” he says, dejected. Suppressing the urge to laugh, I’m at once hit by my own pang of sadness. Arrieta and I had been playing phone and geological tag for weeks now and, with our final weather window closing, a forgotten lunch feels like the drop threatening to spill our rapidly filling cup. Starting from the Basque surf haven of Biarritz, we’re tracing the Adour River to its source, two hours east and up into the mercurial Hautes-Pyrénées and one of the world’s sneakiest sea-to-ski pilgrimages. A corner of Europe forged by pounding surf and rocky alpine, southwestern France was the historical home of hearty fishermen and weathered shepherds long before it became a summer destination for the country’s rich and famous. Nowadays Arrieta and a growing group of adventure sports enthusiasts are harvesting a different kind of regional bounty, opting out of the “AH, PUTAIN! ” dizzying crowds of the Alps to carve out a life of wave-catching and couloir-hunting in this natural anomaly. A hopeful storm system had petered out overnight, and reports from Arrieta’s friend and local skier Julien Colonge aren’t look-ing promising. A few inches here, maybe a bit of wind-loading there—not enough to cover the scars of a two-month melt-freeze cycle. But the Pyrenees are as fickle as they are intricate, a pop-up book of narrow river valleys and unforgiving jagged gneiss flirt-ing with the freezing line and trapping storms off the turbulent Bay of Biscay. Sometimes, Arrieta says, you don’t know until you go. Hungry or not, that’s just enough to keep me in the game. We grab a road-side baguette and a half wheel of sheep’s cheese. It’s time to roll the dice one more time. French Pyrenees 069
The Ski Journal Volume 16, Issue 1: Page 69
