My road to the Pierra Menta probably started a long time ago, when as a wee lad I was totally enamored with skiing; going to Mount Hood every weekend, plastering my school notebooks with ski stickers, and sneaking into a quiet staff lounge at school to call the snow report many days. Around the same time I started running competitively, and weekends in the off season were spent running road 10k’s and Turkey Trots before the ski season got going, and the first really dumb event I did was run the Portland Marathon at 14 years old. I drove my high school cross-country coach (Dave Robbins, who is likely reading this!) crazy because I’d let my fitness wane over the winter and come into the spring track season with big legs and small lungs. But I persisted with this paradoxical sport pursuance for….well, ever. But now, in a fortuitous blending of these two activities, lo these many years hence I find myself on the cusp of competing in the Pierra Menta: the “Tour De France” of skimo racing.
Not long after I moved to Salt Lake around 1999 and started ski touring in earnest in the Wasatch chasing Ashley, Paul, and others around I found out that local ski legend Andrew McClean had heard about randonee racing in Europe and set up a very unofficial “course” of going from Alta Central and do something like up to Pole Line Pass, down into Cardiff, back up, down into Days Fork, back up, down into Silver Fork, and back to Alta – or something like that – and established a time for that and suggested that it might be fun for people to give it a go for time, totally for fun and on the honor system (way before Strava) and called it the Powder Keg. I think I did it, maybe I didn’t; I don’t remember. Then Andrew decided to actually put on a real race that started at Alta, was partly in and out of the resort, and finished at Brighton. It was a big deal to do this: Forest Service permits for the public lands portions, permission from Alta and Brighton, many volunteers, etc. But he took it on, and the Powder Keg was born.
The first couple of races had maybe 60 or so people, but Andrew had traveled enough over to Europe and knew some folks and asked if there was any interest in a race in the US (that might involve some Wasatch powder skiing!) and only a couple of years after its inception the 2004 and 2005 Powder Kegs were World Cup events with all of the best skimo (randonee; “skimo” – short for ski mountaineering – came later) athletes coming to Utah and were stunning with their speed: in addition to their race-specific gear their skinning was incredibly swift, their up -to-down and down-to-up transitioning was happening in seconds, and their downhill skiing on spindly sticks was terrifyingly fast. It opened our eyes to what fast skiing could be.
I did many Powder Kegs over the years, and though the World Cup circuit has not returned to the US, for us locals things changed when around 2010 the Flying Dorais brothers had the great idea to have fun races on Tuesday nights at Brighton. They were – and continue to be – great: kooky people with headamps skinning hard and skiing harder on gear that ranges from lycra-clad geeks in all the lightest shit to people with “normal” touring gear to even folks in abnormal heavy gear like frame bindings and split boards, all going as hard as they can for no apparent reason other than everybody else is going as hard as they can. There were – and still are – no results, just usually a box of cookies to shoever thinks they were the winnner, and sometimes to random folks like “The fastest woman over 50” (that Ash won once) and “who broke some gear” (I didn’t win that, but I shoulda, several times) and there was always a surprisingly good raffle, because the local ski companies like Voile, Black Diamond, and others not so local (Scarpa, La Sportiva, and others) wanted to jump on board. It’s always been very social, and now – with something around 200 folks showing up now for the Tuesday Night World Cups, it’s very social (and, besides the Powder Keg, they are by far the biggest Skimo races outside Europe).
Speaking of Europe, the sport of course has continued to grow; Euros always seem to take to these competitive adventure sports in big ways. And a big part of that has been the longstanding races: the Tour De Rutor, a 2 day, two-man race in the Italian Alps, the Patrolle De Glaciers, a 6-day teams race Switzerland that was started long ago to pit winter soldiers against each other and continues to be a soldier-intensive race, and the Pierra Menta.
The Pierra Menta is a 4 day race in the French Alps just west of Mount Blanc with two-man teams climbing and skiing approximately 30,000 feet of vertical, and this year is the 40th anniversary race.
You have to apply to get in, and in 2020 Colter Leys and I applied and got in, but it was in mid-March and with just days to go the race director had to cancel it due to the bizarre disease that seemed to be rampaging through the mountain villages and then became a global pandemic. Colter and I were in Chamonix already -after I had had a good day at the Powder Keg and flown to France that night (I don’t think I even cramped agonizingly on the plane!) – and made the most of it by just skiing a lot of fun powder there, we went home, and that was that.
Fast forward a few years, and I hadn’t really raced much since 2020; a coupla Tuesday Night World Cups but no Powder Kegs (injuries, out of town, and too early in the season), but colter kinda came out of the blue – I think before he even knew that Ash and I were planning an extended Euro gallivant- and said “hey, (daughter) Carson is gonna be in Europe this winter chasing the youth skimo circuit and I’ll be over there too cheering her on; wanna do the Pierra Menta?” and I didn’t give much thought to saying “sure!” before I gave any thought to “coming out of retirement” for one of the hardest races in the world. But we applied, got in again, and here we are. And this year it’s the World Championship long course race, so it’s even more stacked with folks!
Because it’s a partner race, I had the added pressure of being fit not just to have a good race, but also to keep up with Colter, who has thrived in the national skimo scene over the last few years winnning and podiuming every year in the masters division and placing well overall; his unusual fitness (borne of a misspent youth focusing on Nordic skiing) and hell-bent-for-leather tele skiing style were a perfect blend for skimo. So I “trained” by doing long, hard efforts in Jan and half of February and then moving into faster, harder intervals; like the West, Austria has had a ferocious drought, and it was made much more palatable by not only seeing lots of fun new places with Ash (and Colin, who graced us for a visit) but also to have a mission to train. And I feel like I got pretty fit; as “fit” as I felt in 2020, if perhaps I may have lost a step or two in the ensuing six years.
Ash flew home from Geneva for a week of Higgins time, I went down to meet Colter, all good….until dinner. I had a nice-sounding – and tasting – mushroom risotto dish, went to bed, and woke in the middle of the night clutching my gut and roared into the bathroom. A pretty grim rest of the night ensued, and the next day I had about enough energy to do…..absolutely nothing except sleep, which I did for about 25 hours of the day, with both Colter (who himself is recovering from a bout with the pernicious RSV that hospitalized his son) and I wondering if we have any kind of a chance to race. Given I felt mostly-dead, it seemed quite unlikely.
But incredibly I woke up the morning before the race and felt…..fine? My resting heart rate had dropped (not completely back to normal but closer) and apparently the purging that I had done was a decent cleanse. So we decided to give it a go and be conservative and have a nice time. Nobody cares how we do, I think we could be around mid-pack; maybe on the higher side of that, maybe on the lower side.
Tonight was the briefing, and I told Colter that even at the Powder Keg when I kinda knew the competition and knew I was generally competitive and it was easy to be intimidated, but at the briefing for the Pierra Menta there were nearly 600 athletes there, most of whom are as fit and experienced as us, and many who are much, MUCH faster and more experienced. We both had the same thought: “WTF are we doing here?!?” But here we go!
note: I didn’t quite finish this post yesterday, and we indeed raced today, and it went….okay. I am rusty in my racing skills and had some minor gear issues, and we tried to take it as easy as you can in really difficult terrain, but it’s hard to go easy when it’s Hard!” At this point we are slightly shy of mid-pack, but a buncha teams missed the time cut and are out. Though it was surprisingly hard, we had fun….details to follow! If you want to follow the results – you can go here: https://pierramenta.com/course.html#results and they are on facebook, but so far they only have a 2 hour video up…a bit much!
It’s also fun to see local Wasatch skimo hero Tom Goth knocking around yet again with the best guys in the world. He cramped a bit near the end today but will no doubt start picking up some places over the next coupla days.
Great post. Sounds like you crushed it under the circumstances.