Mont Sutton, Amen

Most of the billboards in The Townships are in French. There’s a conspicuous one near the top of Mont Sutton’s access road that simply says “Amen” branded with the logo and a picture of some beautifully rimed trees.

mont-sutton-skier

It’s a little ambiguous, but after skiing there last weekend, I’d probably define it as “divine bliss and sheer joyfulness from sliding over a soft base of perfection.” Skiing is serious business, after all.

Overstatement? Je ne sais pas. While it hadn’t snowed at the mountain for a few days, life is more than recent snowfall, uphill capacity, double black diamonds, and super fast lifts. Sutton seems to get the fact that those metrics don’t directly translate into fun. From heaven, not hoses, en français.

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Un Bon Voyage

With the promise of a few centimeters of snow in the forecast, my eyes were glued to strange webcams and blogs of a foreign land. I wanted to ski something different, to see the world, in a country that invented the word neige.

Sutton-skier

El Nino’s agua brought with it air in the mild flavor, but my research — or maybe it was wishcasting — paid off.  One forecast called for 2 degrees and rain and another -1 and snow. You know which one I chose.

I arrived after what was sure to be the first of this season’s many white-knuckle drives. My new (ok used, but still with lots of tread) Michelin X-Ice tires felt pretty good in their first winter frolic while winding steep roads in the Sutton Mountains, news as welcomed as the winter precipitation.

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Sutton on a Sunny Afternoon

I tossed the hiking shoes in my trunk as an afterthought while heading to Quebec, but then quickly considered it to be the right decision. Unlike skiing or hiking, climbing is not the best way to familiarize yourself with a new place, so it made sense to fall back on the classic activity while in the Sutton region of Quebec.

Sutton-prive

This charming area, known as the Canton l’Est to the Quebecois (aka the Eastern Townships to us), is like a French speaking mirror of the Green Mountains on the other side of the border, though the mountains are not as tall as the US section of the spine, and they don’t stretch out in the same north-south orientation.

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