Snow & ski

Christopher Solomon
New York Times News Service

It was 9:30 on a Sunday morning in the heart of ski season, yet not a single person waited at the ticket booth to buy a lift pass. Outside, nobody was queued up to ride the gondola.

When we reached the mountaintop, our disorientation only deepened. A spoked Mediterranean sun shone overhead, but in every direction big, white, Switzerland-worthy mountains were stapled to the Windex-blue sky.

We were deep in the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain, a land of ragged beauty and surprisingly great skiing. Spain has a reputation, or should we say a few reputations – Pamplona and paella; beaches and bullfights. Most travellers don’t think of lugging their K2s here.

What few snow enthusiasts know is that the Pyrenees, which divide France from Spain, hide some three dozen ski resorts.

“‘The Pyrenees – is there skiing there?’ It’s like a stuck record for us,” said Dave Slattery of Baqueira British Ski School, which caters to English-speaking skiers who venture to the resort of Baqueira/Beret in the northwesternmost corner of Catalonia.

When I heard that Baqueira/Beret is Spain’s lower-key answer to Aspen, I was intrigued and high on the mountain, my friend Tim and I took in the almost surreal surroundings. Although lower in elevation, the Pyrenees in winter do a decent imitation of the Alps.

Frozen whitecaps of granite peaks surrounded us. Due south lay the high country of Aiguestortes i Estany De Sant Maurici National Park, dotted with icy lakes. In the distance, Aneto, at 3,400 meters the highest peak in the Pyrenees, scratched the horizon, a shrunken glacier hunkered on its shoulder.

Wait – glaciers in Spain? Our disorientation was complete. We decided to just give in and savour the dizziness.

I’d been told the valley the ski resort inhabits, the Val d’Aran, is nearly as much an attraction as the skiing. Now it was spread out below us, 40 kilometres long, with the ski resort at one end, France at the other end and several villages anchored by 12th-century churches sprinkled in between.

Distanced from the rest of Spain by the mountains and by winter snows, the region is in some ways nearly as French as it is Spanish, with duck and foie gras on local menus.

But the valley is also very much its own place; unlike most other Spanish valleys in the Pyrenees, the Val d’Aran faces the Atlantic, catching more storms and thus tending to have more reliable snow.

Baqueira/Beret is the largest ski area in Spain, and it is indeed big. Some 1,900 hectares – around 400 hectares larger than Big Sky, Montana – sprawl over six peaks and ridges that are served by 33 lifts. The place isn’t just wide, it is also tall, with a vertical drop to match Vail, Colorado. When all the terrain is open, there are weeks of exploration to be done here. No wonder Spain’s royal family likes to ski here.

Geography divides the resort into three distinct base areas. We headed north first. Beret is the resort’s most family-friendly sector, with beginner and intermediate runs spilling off the 2,500-meter Tuc deth Dossau peak. With the runs broad and firm and fast under the fine grooming, we opened the throttle and smoked down them on our giant-slalom skis, grateful that everyone else had slept late and left the pistes open for us.

Beret doesn’t keep the advanced skier entertained for long, however, so we tried Bonaigua, the third sector. For Tim and me, Bonaigua felt like one of the better ski areas in the American West.

On our last afternoon we skied up to a cabin on the slopes in Beret. It was a new Champagne bar. A DJ began to play on the sunny deck.

Usually the ski bum in me hated this kind of thing. There never was much time left to ski, but instead I plopped into a deck chair facing the sun, shut my eyes and considered a flute of bubbly.

It didn’t seem disorienting. It seemed right.