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Learning to snowboard — in France
Thirty-something skier takes on the challenge of mastering a new sport
 | The village of Les Arcs 1950, opened by developer Intrawest in 2003 at the Les Arcs ski resort in Savoie, France. |
Kelvin Chan / AP file |
LES ARCS, France - The resort of Les Arcs in the French Alps is renowned for having 125 miles of runs, a lift system that can take you all the way up to 10,500 feet, and a cable car that connects to the neighboring valley of La Plagne.
But I didn't experience much of that on my week there. Instead, I spent a lot of my time at the resort's highest station, Les Arcs 2000, falling down on the bunny slopes as I tried to learn to snowboard in a six-day group course.
As a kid I learned to ski. But I had never snowboarded. As I entered my 30s, I wanted to see what I was missing before I got too old to learn. How hard could it be?
A week later, I had my answer: I had learned to snowboard, but my class had its share of injuries and drop-outs along the way.
Tucked away in the Savoy region, close to where France meets the borders of Switzerland and Italy, Les Arcs is probably not a name familiar to North American skiers and snowboarders. Its slopes, overlooked by Mont Blanc towering in the distance, attract mainly French visitors, including many families.
My wife and I chose the resort partly because a guidebook recommended it as one of the best places in Europe for beginner boarders and skiers. (She didn't know how to ski and opted for those classes instead of snowboarding.) Les Arcs was also one of the few places available when we booked our trip from Britain at the last minute.
I signed up for afternoon lessons with Ecole du Ski Francais, the main school at Les Arcs 2000, and joined a class of about two dozen. The class was split among French kids, and Dutch and British vacationers.
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We spent the first few days mastering basics on the bunny hill, where we learned to control our speed by leaning on the board's front or back edge — or, as our teachers said, by "back hedging" or "front hedging".
Everyone seemed to master sliding back and forth to some degree down the hill on one edge. But making a complete turn from one side to the other proved trickier.
The instructors kept exhorting us to "keep your body in line with ze board!" Some took to it more naturally than others, but one Dutch woman struggled. Two days in, she gave up in frustration.
Making a turn proved to be a challenge for me too — the delicate exercise of shifting weight from my heels to toes (or vice versa) and keeping my weight over the front of the board instead of the back. The sensation that I was about to topple headfirst down the hill whenever I leaned forward was unnerving, and I fell countless times until I got it right. Unlike some of my classmates, I hadn't brought along a pair of padded undershorts to protect my backside.
That, combined with the vigorous use of muscles that are usually neglected during my normal desk-bound life, made the first few days and evenings painful and achy.
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Not that we'd have much luck. As we discovered, Les Arcs 2000 is a modernist super-resort built during the fever for architectural modernism that swept France in the 1960s and 1970s.
Unlike Swiss or Austrian ski areas that grew up around centuries-old villages, Les Arcs is a purpose-built ski resort plunked down on a mountainside — in this case at 6,500 feet or 2,000 meters up, hence the name. (Sister resorts 1600, at 5,250 feet, and 1800, at 5,900 feet, are lower down; a more recent addition, 1950, at, 6,400 feet, is next door.)
Les Arcs 2000 consists mainly of a line of big angular, timber-clad hotels with swooping rooflines that zigzag across the mountainside. There's not much in the way of apres-ski, just a few bars and restaurants.
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