NO SKILLS,
ALL THRILLS

How could barelling down a mountain on a giant inner tube not be fun?

by CHRIS BARRY

“I think people are coming to recognize that spending their winters entirely indoors all the time isn’t so great. Winter in Quebec lasts a long time, so you can’t just hide in your living room watching TV the entire season, you’ve got to go out there and embrace it. Come up north to the Laurentiens and just enjoy the beautiful winter scenery while you’re snowshoeing, or snowboarding, or skiing! Come to Mont Avila and go tubing. It’s all so much fun! You can learn to enjoy winter, it’s a great time of year, you just have to go for it.”

—Christian Dufour, marketing director for the MSSI group of ski hills, and avid winter enthusiast.

Ever have anyone try to sell you on the majesty of Quebec winters with this sort of nonsense before? Chances are, if you’ve spent a good chunk of your life in this part of the world, somebody, maybe your therapist or some other health professional, has inevitably offered up this approach as an alternative to the suicide you always find yourself contemplating come the first few bitterly cold weeks of January. And they offer this advice for good reason. Because maybe, just maybe, there’s a vague ring of truth to it.

Of course, embracing the—let’s be honest here and face it—HELL of winter with a positive, sports-minded attitude is a lot easier said than done. What if, like me, your previous efforts to “embrace” the season through, say, some half-hearted attempt at snowboarding, has just left you with bruises and the sinking feeling that you are perhaps, indeed, the uncoordinated retard your Grade 8 phys-ed teacher always said you were? Because shucks, man, stoic or not, that ain’t any fun.

NO LEARNING INVOLVED

But there is one alternative Dufour refers to in the charmingly quixotic quote highlighted above that might actually be worth considering for the winter-dreading, athletically challenged, Prozac-popping depressoids among us: snow tubing. “It’s great,” Dufour tells me enthusiastically, “it involves no skill whatsoever, all you do is fit yourself into the tube and down the hill you go. It’s kind of like a waterslide, except you’re sliding on snow.”

Hmm, okay, sounds an awful lot like tobogganing to my ears, but I suppose you’ve got to admire a winter “sport” that doesn’t involve learning how to do anything. “What happens,” says Dufour, “is that, with time, you don’t so much get better at it, but you do get more comfortable. Then, before you know it, you start wanting to go down the hill backwards and trying other tricks like that. Believe me, once you’re tubing you feel like a kid again. Except instead of riding a Krazy Karpet down, say, Mount Royal or some place like that, you’re in a tube, on a big ski hill, and you’ve got chair lifts to take you back up the mountain. Here at Mont Avila, we have 16 slopes you can ride in the snow tubes. We’ve got smaller slopes, bigger slopes—all offering different thrills. For example, on the steeper hills, you might get going as fast as 40 kilometres an hour. It’s all very safe though.”

GUARANTEED FUN

So okay, I have to admit that with the right drugs snow tubing truly does sound like a winter activity that could actually be kind of fun, and certainly, if the growing popularity of the “sport” is anything to go by, there are plenty of people out there who feel the same way.

“Snow tubing really only came to Quebec about 10 years ago,” says Dufour, “but at Mont Avila we now get approximately the same number of people riding the tube slides as we do skiers.”

Dufour acknowledges that’s partly because there are only so many Laurentien ski centres currently offering the activity (for example, there is also tubing at Mont Gabriel and Tremblant). “You really just need to try it sometime,” Dufour insists. “There’s no way you won’t have fun.”

For more information on snow tubing at Mont Avila go to www.mssi.ca or call (450) 227-4671