For my final stop on this trip through the Maritimes Alps, I headed northwest from Valberg to the Val d'Allos or Allos Valley -- only 18 miles as the crow flies, but an almost two-hour drive in winter through stunning landscapes. This report includes a bit of travelogue, which is part of the Europe experience -- getting to a destination and the surrounding activities are often as important as the skiing, especially in the sunny and rugged south of France with so much history tied to it.
You start out going through scenic Daluis Gorge, something that wouldn't look out of place in southern Utah with its red-rock topography popular for kayaking, hiking, and rappelling.
A half hour later, the road starts gaining elevation and passes by a few more 1,000-year-old cliffside villages:
A group of five-year-olds learning nordic skiing as part of a class outing -- something I don't think I've ever seen in the U.S.
Lunch at a local restaurant with the requisite fresh bread and house pooch, a Great Pyrenees sheep dog. I'd never heard of this breed but it's apparently well-known amongst dog lovers:
There, I met local Eric, who gave me a quick tour of Peyresq, a cliffside village a couple minutes away:
Earlier at the restaurant, I tried this fantastic local beer and learned that the brewery was just outside town and gave tours, so I headed over to Brasserie Cordoeil. Something I'd noticed over the previous few days was that younger French people/millennials weren't all necessarily wine lovers or experts and that many were passionate craft beer drinkers.
For some reason, I always expect breweries to be dark, musty, wooden places, but this place looked and felt more like a laboratory: very high-tech and unbelievably clean -- you could literally eat off the floor. Founder Boris Pougnet did a great job explaining the nuts and bolts of how he created his tasty brews. He's an engineer by trade, which you could tell by the precision in his explanations (photos by Eric Olive).
Followed by the obligatory tasting of the product:
The next day, I arrived at Seignus, 3,000 verts of consistent double-blue/single-black pitch with lots of beautiful offpiste. It could easily be connected to the main Val d'Allos circuit (out of frame to the right), but they left it separate as a local's area, very similar to how Pico is to Killington..
It's known mainly as a high-speed cruising type of ski area but there were plenty of well-preserved leftovers -- the skier in most of these photos is local Anasthasia, who did a great job showing me around the slopes:
Only one surface lift, on the skier's right:
The signature run is a top-to-bottom trail on the far skier's left -- you're supposed to try to clean the whole thing without stopping but I needed a break about halfway down:
A late lunch at this mid-mountain restaurant closed out my introduction to Seignus with the larger Espace Lumiere circuit planned for the following day:
You start out going through scenic Daluis Gorge, something that wouldn't look out of place in southern Utah with its red-rock topography popular for kayaking, hiking, and rappelling.
A half hour later, the road starts gaining elevation and passes by a few more 1,000-year-old cliffside villages:
A group of five-year-olds learning nordic skiing as part of a class outing -- something I don't think I've ever seen in the U.S.
Lunch at a local restaurant with the requisite fresh bread and house pooch, a Great Pyrenees sheep dog. I'd never heard of this breed but it's apparently well-known amongst dog lovers:
There, I met local Eric, who gave me a quick tour of Peyresq, a cliffside village a couple minutes away:
Earlier at the restaurant, I tried this fantastic local beer and learned that the brewery was just outside town and gave tours, so I headed over to Brasserie Cordoeil. Something I'd noticed over the previous few days was that younger French people/millennials weren't all necessarily wine lovers or experts and that many were passionate craft beer drinkers.
For some reason, I always expect breweries to be dark, musty, wooden places, but this place looked and felt more like a laboratory: very high-tech and unbelievably clean -- you could literally eat off the floor. Founder Boris Pougnet did a great job explaining the nuts and bolts of how he created his tasty brews. He's an engineer by trade, which you could tell by the precision in his explanations (photos by Eric Olive).
Followed by the obligatory tasting of the product:
The next day, I arrived at Seignus, 3,000 verts of consistent double-blue/single-black pitch with lots of beautiful offpiste. It could easily be connected to the main Val d'Allos circuit (out of frame to the right), but they left it separate as a local's area, very similar to how Pico is to Killington..
It's known mainly as a high-speed cruising type of ski area but there were plenty of well-preserved leftovers -- the skier in most of these photos is local Anasthasia, who did a great job showing me around the slopes:
Only one surface lift, on the skier's right:
The signature run is a top-to-bottom trail on the far skier's left -- you're supposed to try to clean the whole thing without stopping but I needed a break about halfway down:
A late lunch at this mid-mountain restaurant closed out my introduction to Seignus with the larger Espace Lumiere circuit planned for the following day: