PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA!” my instructor Justine hollering at me, somewhere in the French Alps, as I hurtled toward a small child at what felt like the speed of sound. “Pizza,” for the uninitiated, is ski-instructor code for “point your skis like a slice, you absolute menace, before you kill someone.” It is not, as I first assumed, an announcement that lunch was ready. Justine teaches at ESF 1550 — the ski school that, mercifully, specialises in turning beginners like me into people who can stop on command.
Skiing, I learned, comes in a handy colour-coded threat system: green (you will survive), blue (you will probably survive), red (call your family), and black (update your will). I spent two glorious days exclusively on green, wobbling with real commitment but never once going down, and emerged with the unshakeable conviction that I was, in fact, born to ski. Evolution had simply misplaced me in a polluted city for fifty-odd years by mistake.
On the last day we rode the gondola to the highest peak, where the view was so good even the influencers on board briefly forgot to film themselves. There is a particular kind of humility that only a mountain can hand you — the sense that you are, at best, a minor footnote to some very old rock, and that this is somehow a relief rather than an insult.
The Museum With No Walls
Up there, apparently, is where L’Art au Sommet — “Art at the Summit” — lives: an open-air exhibition that turns the mountaintop into a gallery, presumably for people who found regular museums insufficiently cold. What actually got me wasn’t just the art, though. It was also watching skiers pour off the gondola and just go — no lingering, no small talk, no “wait, let me get a picture.” Meanwhile I was up there gripping the safety bar like it owed me money, trying to look like a person who was “in control” and not a person who had recently discovered gravity is real. I started skiing at fifty, which felt less like a hobby and more like proof that reinvention has no deadline — nobody hands you a form that says you’ve missed the window. I am now, alarmingly, obsessed. Send help, or better yet, send a helicopter.
The Village Where Everyone Is Either a Billionaire or Serving One
Apparently Brad Pitt, Beyoncé, the Beckhams, George Clooney, and — reader, I gasped — Virat Kohli all vacation here, which means the odds are decent I skied past someone famous while looking like a confused burrito in a helmet. Courchevel 1850 is a tiny, tightly-zipped little village where you can buy a Rolex, a Gucci bag, and a fondue within the same fifty metres, which feels less like shopping and more like a very expensive scavenger hunt.
Where My Bank Account Went to Have a Panic Attack
Our meals at Lou Lou at Hotel Fouquet’s, SALTO at Rosewood Courchevel Le Jardin Alpin and at Cha Cha Courchevel 1850 were the kind of dining that makes you order dessert purely out of scientific curiosity — I ate like I belonged there, which is to say: very seriously, and slightly too fast.
We stayed at La Sivolière and La Loze, two boutique properties I’d recommend wholeheartedly. The staff were the kind of warm that makes you suspicious you’re being buttered up for the bill. Ask for Julien Strozyk, Sales Manager for La Sivolière, because apparently even my memory needed a green run to get used to this trip; he’s the man with the stories, and the one who quietly makes the whole stay feel effortless.
Somewhere in between all this, Florent Hazucka, Head of Press Department at Courchevel Tourisme, handed us a playlist of moody French music, which we played on the balcony while watching snow fall and pretending we, too, casually summer (winter?) in the Alps.
The Part Where I Got Emotional in a Helicopter
We also took a helicopter ride over the Alps with David Dereani, a Certified Guide with Jet Systems, because apparently that’s just a Tuesday here. The peaks looked close enough to touch, the snow sparkled like it had personally hired a lighting designer, and I had the sudden, dramatic realisation that I am extremely small in an extremely large universe. Rumi once wrote, “Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.” It’s a lovely sentiment, and also exactly what I told myself while white-knuckling the helicopter seatbelt for dear life. Somewhere between the fear and the view, the two feelings stopped competing and just became the same thing — which is perhaps what people mean when they say a trip changed them, even if what changed you was seventy percent altitude and thirty percent existential dread.
10/10 would humiliate myself on a green slope again — and would happily let the mountains put me in my place, over and over, for as long as they’ll have me.
