CANADIAN CLUB
Discover a winter playground like no other in the ancient landscape of Quebec
Why fly across the Atlantic to ski, when the Alps are just round the corner? The short answer is: snow. There were huge piles of the stuff in Quebec last season – and that was in a supposedly warm year. Every time I got on a chairlift, my fingertips gently losing blood supply, a friendly Québécois skier leant across and said: ‘Il fait chaud.’
The cold is the price you pay for snow: -20 at its coldest, when I skied down Mont-Sainte-Anne, the mountain just 25 miles northeast of Quebec City. What you also get is a complete change of view from the slopes. Mountains are mountains, right? Wrong. The Quebec mountains are some of the oldest in the world, hundreds of millions of years older than the Alps. That means they’ve had many more aeons of erosion. So, where the Alps are sharp and spiny, Mont-Sainte-Anne and its neighbour Mont Grand-Fonds are smooth and rounded.
Best of all, you're close to the Saint Lawrence River, the 10-milewide waterway that drains the Great Lakes into the Atlantic. The river is really a sea at this point: tidal and salty. I couldn’t take my eyes off it for the whole week, glinting away at the foot of the mountain, half-frozen, with discs of ice 20 feet across gliding up and down with the tide.
Because you’re nearer to the valley floor than you are in the Alps, the runs are shorter. But that also means you have broad, flat and gently sloping expanses of snow for other winter sports. Quebec is the snowmobile capital of North America, and Americans will cross the border specifically for this. Dozens regularly trudged through the lobby of my hotel in their Michelin Man protective outfits.
There was plenty of room for us all in the Canadian wilderness. I drove for 20 miles and only saw half a dozen other people on the enormous plain, bookended by the mountains on the horizon. Round here, snowmobiles are like cars, their paths like empty white motorways, with official green road signs all the way down to Montreal, 200 miles to the south. Snowmobiling is easy – ‘Just like jet-skiing,’ I told my sister when I got back to London, who promptly took me to task for my overprivileged similes. So, just like riding a bike; easier even, without any of the effort.
There is a little more effort required for dog-sledding. You have to lean on the brake – a metal jaw that bites into the snow – when the huskies get too keen. And, boy, are they keen. I have never seen animals with such an aching desire to drag heavy loads across miles of sub-zero woodland, field and slope. When I turned up at the remote Chenil du Sportif kennel, the huskies were barking their heads off, longing to be chosen for the two-hour trip.
You only have to apply that brake sparingly – for two brief rest stops for the dogs, and the occasional loo stop. And then again, when they race downhill, and the heavy sledge is in danger of crashing into the back legs of the last pair of the eight.
Otherwise, though, you just let them follow in the paw prints of the dogs pulling the other sledge ahead of you. And you are left to enjoy the thrill of the far north, silent but for the metronomic pitter-patter of those paws racing across the snow, and the soft swish-swish of sledge on snow – the closest I've come to a natural, wild form of transport.
The other great difference from the Alps is that you’re so close to towns and cities, both horizontally and vertically. Those wonderful places like Verbier began life as tiny farming villages far from the great Alpine cities. My skiing, snowmobiling and dog-sledding were only half an hour’s drive, with minimal climbing, from La Malbaie and Quebec City, and the two palaces I stayed in: the stately Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu and Fairmont Le Château Frontenac.
They were built in 1899 and 1893 respectively, in pre-wintersports days, when people spent more time in their hotel and less time on the slopes, so they are designed for high-Victorian lounging in recently renovated surroundings. Both hotels share a staggering architectural style: Dracula’s castle meets the châteaux of the Loire.
La Malbaie is a charming town – a mixture of New England, classical clapboard houses and Gothic Addams Family mansions. Quebec City is something more: the prettiest in North America, I’d say without exaggeration, having lived in New York and travelled across both the States and Canada for a year and a half.
It is really two cities. First, there’s old Quebec, founded by the French in the early 17th century down by the Saint Lawrence River. It still looks like an ancient French city today, with its classical stone houses and soaring church spires. Then, up on the cliffs above the river, you have the British colonial city, captured by General Wolfe from the French in 1759. Walk along the Dufferin Terrace, the great wooden walkway named after the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, the Governor-General of Canada from 1872 to 1878. And you must experience the toboggan slide that, each winter, allows you to race down from the Dufferin Terrace at about 50 miles an hour.
Despite all the French speakers, no one referred to après-ski, because so many hotel guests were doing things other than skiing. Still, there was plenty of après-snowmobile and après-dog-sledding in the regal bars and restaurants of the Manoir Richelieu and the Château Frontenac, with their ever-changing views of the Saint Lawrence. There’s nothing like it – not even in the Alps.
Fairmont Le Château Frontenac, from about £125 a room a night; and Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu from about £80 a room a night, both with Fairmont (www.fairmont.com). Air Canada (www.aircanada.com) flies from London Heathrow to Quebec City, from £427 return.