Bring Your Skis and Earplugs: A Week in Andorra, Part 1

In case you haven’t heard of it, like me before I met my Spanish partner, Andorra is a Principality in the Pyrenees, bordered by both Spain and France. Leadership of this microstate is shared by the president of France and the Catholic Bishop of Urgell in the Catalonian region of Spain.

Andorra is a strange place. In addition to its sprawling alpine ski resorts, it seems to be THE tax-free shopping destination for the region, particularly for alcohol, tobacco, perfumes, and domestic electronics. This also seems to give it an intense and distinctly anti-me vibe. I’ve never seen so many people smoking in the street, and every night, I jammed in my earplugs to the beat of surround-sound parties.

Despite the never-ending drinking, smoking, and shouting that come with this tiny country, one of my partner’s friends has been doing a week-long ski trip at the Grandvalira resort in this region for a number of years. While my partner has been a few times, this was the first time I was able to come along.

Despite growing up in a ski region, I didn’t learn how to ski until I was an adult—almost exactly 7 years ago. Since then, my skiing has been mostly low key—a couple half-to-full-days at Whiteface in the Adirondacks, where I am from, and Formigal, here in the Spanish Pyrenees. For a couple years before we moved, we were also lucky to get night passes for a group of resorts outside of the Washington DC area: Liberty, Whitetail, and Roundtop in Maryland and Pennsylvania. These years, I skied for a few hours after work a couple days a week. As such, while I was less concerned about my ability and skills, I wasn’t so sure I could tolerate full days of skiing for a whole week. However, as well-rounded, perhaps too much so, winter enthusiasts, my partner and I brought our piolets, ice tools, crampons, and snowshoes to vary our activities a bit.

In the end, I skied for about three days. I tended to cut the day an hour or so shorter than the rest of the group. Unlike what I am used to when skiing, where everyone sort of goes their own way, this group was very much together. They also didn’t really “warm-up” so to say, which means that I now see my three days of skiing as the reverse of what they should be—gradually decreasing in intensity and duration.

The first day, we skied the most, heading from where we were staying in Pas de la Casa to Grau Roig. Normally, I start on the green slopes to warm up, then on the blue for most of the time, maybe throwing in a few reds, and maybe an easy black route if I’m feeling spicy. For those that don’t ski: green is the easiest, then blue, red, and black. Well, on this day, we started on a red slope, which I later denied ever going down. I blame heedlessly launching myself down such a steep slope without a second thought on passing almost an entire year without skiing.

After that, we thankfully went down a few blue slopes. We then split up with me and another member of our group taking a mild blue slope that suddenly turned into a red slope with a horribly steep part. I said to my companion, “I think this is too difficult for me,” but continued on after some brief encouragement because I could see it was very short.

Later though, I would try an “off piste” route that had been so heavily trafficked that it was a mess of fossilized tracks, lumps, and bumps. I fell once, had to back track by literally skiing backwards, and went incredibly slow. I made it but was so exhausted by the time I was done that my mental ability to challenge myself was over. This meant that I later completely abandoned a red slope when we reached a super steep, longer section. Instead, I walked up an adjacent, short, closed slope to take an alternate route down. After that, I committed to doing only the blue slopes and shortly retired to doing laps on the training hill to relax and cool down for the day.

The next day, we left directly from Pas de la Casa, a luxury I have never experienced—walking from your apartment directly to a ski slope. After a short warm-up on the easier routes, we headed up the mountain between Pas de La Casa and Grau Roig (The ski resorts in Andorra are massive). However, instead of going down the red slope that I apparently went down the first day, I started shaking my head, crying, and asking my partner why we can’t ever do anything easy. I firmly denied ever going down that slope, and I’m honestly still not convinced, despite being assured by three different people that I did indeed ski down it.

This is just me, I guess. Whenever my partner asks me some variation of, “Can you believe we did that?” my answer is always, “No.” And I mean it. To me, I am two different people—the real me and some other person who somehow disassociates long enough to do something adventurous. I hope we both meet one day; I’d like to ask what her secret is.

So, I refused a second time down the red slope. I often feel quite limited by my mental abilities. I can most likely physically ski down every red slope and some black slopes, which I have done in other resorts. I rarely fall when skiing and have good control over my skis and my body. I do not have good control over my mind, and I am afraid of feeling out of control. Sometimes, it overwhelms me, especially when faced with steeper terrain. I know the best way to overcome this is to practice more, but there is a tradeoff between enjoying myself and pushing myself. I have to push myself to do a lot of things, both in life and athletics. Sometimes, I run out of desire or willpower or whatever fleeting magic mental spice exists in my head. Sometimes, I just want to enjoy myself.

The rest of my days skiing, I mostly stuck to what I knew I would enjoy—the long winding forest routes or the wide and sparsely peopled slopes. Well, except for the time I took a wrong turn and cut through part of the ungroomed area between two slopes so I could meet up with the rest of the group. Those last couple days, I spent more time skiing on my own, which, honestly, is really what I like. When skiing with others, it’s not like you really talk much on the slope, so you are sort of on your own in a way, but I like the freedom of choosing my own routes and learning the layout of the slopes. When I can move at my own pace and in my own style, I relax—that imaginary, ungraspable pressure I place on myself dissipates, and I am more likely to try slightly harder routes, go a little faster, and even experiment with tiny jumps. So perhaps it’s not that I tire of pushing myself, but that I resist being pushed by others.

Next week, I’ll write about the second half of my trip to Andorra, where I snowshoed up two mountains and answer the important question: Is this COVID or just the first cold I’ve had in two years?