powder and fry sauce

A friend had come over from London for the weekend to enjoy the snow in the mountains. Today it was my turn to accompany her on the slopes. In striking difference to the days before, it didn't rain in the morning, the roads were dry in the valley, and it looked like a nice day lay ahead. But it was cold.

We met at the main bus terminal to catch the shuttle up to Chamrousse, but by the time we both got there, fifteen minutes before departure, it was already too late to get a seat. The bus was full, and we were not on it. The alternative that was offered promised a leisurely day. Take the next bus an hour and a half later and go to Sept Laux. We enjoy the intervening ninety minutes at a nearby cafe drinking expresso and cappucino.

When we finally got to the resort it was late enough that an afternoon pass was all we needed. We geared up, took the main lift up the mountain, and entered a different world. At the top, it felt like we had taken the extra long lift all the way to the North pole. An arctic storm with violent gusts was blowing over the crest, the biting cold crept into my gloves almost immediately, and thousands of little ice crystals beat our faces bright red. It was so cold that, as I discovered later, the water in the tube of my CamelBak, safely hidden underneath my GoreTex shell, was frozen solid.

The blizzard had another disconcerting effect. Many slopes were bare of the fresh snow that had apparently fallen plentifully and were decorated with insidious patches of ice that invariably outmaneouvered the dull edges of my seven-year old board, never sharpened before. We got our satisfaction mainly from braving the gruesome conditions.

We finally found fun when I spotted an off-piste slope, protected from the weather, steep and powdery looking, that ended in a lovely maze of little spruce trees. Diving into the waist-deep powder reminded me of snowriding in Utah. Like Honeycomb Canyon before the lift out was built, our hidden treasure treated us to a floating descent with impeccable turns, only to spit us onto a long and painfully flat crawl back to the base of the resort.

The memory was so vivid that I couldn't help but add another element to it. When we were eating burgers and fries in one of the bars in the village at the end of the day, I made fry sauce, this uniquely Utahn condiment consisting of ketchup and mayo in similar amounts stirred until the color reaches a pale pink. Under the doubtful glances of my friend, I created my "little bit of Utah" high up in the French Alps. Delicious.