LEFT TO RIGHT An unexpected day of cold powder and blue skies is reason enough to celebrate on the skin track. Julien Colonge (pictured) and Guillaume Arrieta shadow cheers their good fortune. Photo: Guillaume Arrieta In European ski culture, snacking is a full-time sport. The author, Guillaume Arrieta and Matt Viveau, go for gold between bowl laps. Photo: Julien Colonge BY THE TIME ARRIETA and I reach his snow camp, Colonge can’t stop shaking his head. The longhaired mountain guide had stayed the night in the zone adjacent to Bareges, where the Adour begins its journey down to the Basque coast. He’d given us a pes-simistic snow report just hours before, but his physical disbelief has given way to a wide smile. A sunrise run had been way deeper than expected, and even though skies had broken blue, temperatures had stayed cold. If the wind had blown the way he anticipated, the next basin over could provide some elusive Pyrenean magic. Raised in the shadow of Chamonix, Colonge grew up skiing classic, technical descents. When he chased an engineering job to this corner of France 11 years ago, he was excited to finally live near a coastline, but didn’t have high expectations for the mountains. “People in the Alps think the Pyrenees are hills,” Colonge says. “We were wrong. We didn’t know how to look for it.” He and Arrieta linked up through their ski sponsor, Zag, a few years back, and have been exploring the border range’s intricacies ever since. Grounded during the pandemic, the pair, along with Maisonnave, Bernes-Heuga, Gouldain and Viveau put together the homegrown Meu Pirenèus , a comprehensive video diary of the sheer possibility to be found in these jagged peaks. But as we skin up into a trackless, rock-spire-lined bowl, Colonge says it’s not the objectives made that have turned this place into his adopted home. “In Chamonix, we had to wait to take the first chairlift, there was stress, so many guides, so much lack of knowledge,” he re-counts. “Here? No sounds, no crowds, no people. I appreciate it more and more.” Putting his camera away, Arrieta lays down first tracks. It has been a long, dry winter, and the first powder turns of 2022 are nothing short of cathartic. Letting out a primal scream, he slashes a silent arc before launching off a 10-foot cliff at full speed. Colonge and I follow one by one, each putting our original signature on an otherwise blank canvas. We take our time slapping on skins for round two, the only other people in our zone just beginning their long ascent at nearly 11 a.m. Now all three of us are our shaking our heads in disbelief. If this is Pyreneeism, I’m here for it. Knowing conditions in this range could change at a moment’s notice, we ski until our legs can’t take anymore, standing atop our final line in the late-afternoon sun. Colonge has already peeled off from our pack and, as if on cue, the clouds start their journey eastward from the sea. Harvesting cold crystalline perfection, I milk my last turns in Europe’s overlooked alpine holdout. Arrieta yo-yos past me and points toward the river leading us home. 078 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 16, Issue 1: Page 78
