Chamonix Trip Report - Day 2 - Joyeux Noel

It was pretty Christmasy in our little room the next morning. I brought coffee in bed for Jill, there was tons of snow coming down outside and we had our gifts that we had packed in our carry-ons. There was the advent calendar from Nammy and the tiny little wrapped box mom had sent us off with for our stocking which was a miniature Christmas music box with a miniature snow covered town and moving train. This is the music box that looks just like Chamonix and that you can put in your pocket and have Christmas anywhere.It was GreyBird in Chamonix Christmas morning and its good thing, because being there in any other kind of weather without skis would have would have promptly caused me to turn into either a little pile of slush or a huge car sized boulder tumbling down a 45 degree slope. So it was pretty easy to take this day to: 1)wait to see if our ski gear arrived 2)get over our jetlag 3)eat a huge french style Christmas meal 4) scope out the ski rental scene.
It was a tough call because our luggage included not only all our ski cloths and skis, but also all our other gear such as rope, harnesses, hardware, beacon probe, shovel and cameras. You can't rent ski cloths so we were faced with the decision of purchasing entire outfits with the posibility of our luggage showing up that very moment. Three things made the decision for us: First was our discovery of the store
"Technical Extreme" This place had super dirt cheap ski cloths. Second factor was a bar conversation. We were is a little back alley of Chamonix in a tiny little bar drinking beer. As the night went on we began a conversation with he bar tender, a super young kid from Bazil and was fluent in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. We began talking about the mountains. When I asked him if he skied or snowboarded he exclaimed: "I am a Freerider!" He was super animated and excited about skiing. He was a pro and explained to us that it had been snowing for three days and that there was 1 meter 10 cm of fresh and that the sky was clearing and that at 6:30am he would be on an early bin and start hiking at Brevant with his telle and alpine bros for a deep bluebird photo shoot. Third and deciding factor was an email from my father that went something like this:

"Did I ever tell you about the night Alastair and Brad and I spent in the Gondola at the top? We had just come down from, and I'll not have the spelling correct, El Dromidair and the Aquie DuMidi. It was too late to catch a ride down, we'd spent the previous sleepless night in a hut, playing cards by candle lite with a deck that had the Jack of Spades missing. Remind me to tell you what happened, if I've not
already."

or there was this note:

"I told you once, I believe, of my first journey to Chamonix. It was around 15 Dec, 1963. I had leave from my army base in Hiedelberg and was headed there to meet Brad Reed, who got leave from his Radio-Free-Europe US Coast Guard cutter in the Mediterranean. I took a wrong turn at some rail station just before i was to arrive in Chamonix and ended up around midnight with my cog-train clacking up a steep ridge and finally pulling into a very small village for the night. It was the first huge snow storm with the wet flakes were stacking deeply and there were 4 of us with no place to stay. I had my extended Kelty aluminum frame expedition pack with crampons and ropes and my first REI external frame tent. Between the four us there was, as I remember, not a shared language. We all trudged up from the station, very cold and tired and finally pounded on the door of what seemed like the the hotel where Hansel and Grettel would stay. After a while a fine old "Kurtish" kind of man came and welcomed us all happily into his great room where the big fire was still going. The Hotel was closed, but he brought us big glasses of hot wine, a loaf of very dark bread and a pan of melted butter and then said goodnight and left us to "camp" on his great-room floor in front of his fire with the big logs. He let none of us pay and by noon the next day I was in Chamonix and had met up with Brad and Alastair at the La National, the climbing guides bar and hang-out, just along the glacial river and off the central square.

Anyway, more than you wanted to read when you could be skiing. It only seems like yesterday now with you there. So go ski, even if you have to rent or borrow skis!"

So now maybe you see why I love my father's stories and why it is so great when he writes them all down or tells them in detail. and maybe now you see why these notes were the deciding factor in helping us make our decision about what our next course of action would be.