Winter Wonderland

While the winter lasts, every weekend is festival time on Montreal's Mount Royal. Up the snow-cloaked mountain, rising from the heart of the city, youngsters pull sleds and toboggans (which early Canadians copied from the Micmac Indians). Skiers plod up through the powdery snow. A few, bundled under buffalo robes, ride up grandly in bright red carrioles behind teams of steaming horses (for $6).

In the pell-mell downhill rush of thousands, it seems as if the whole city is trying to break its collective neck. Even the cops on skis spend more time carting off the fallen than keeping skiers in line.

All this has long added up to lots of old-fashioned fun for Montrealers. But Montreal, like the rest of Canada, has been smart enough to see that fun can also be big business. So this winter, the first big postwar season, Canada's hundreds of winter resorts are spending thousands of dollars to promote winter sports. For those who wanted them, there is still snowshoeing, sleigh and dog-team rides and tobogganing. But the real frost king is the ski business.

Among Canada's famed skiing lands is the Banff-Jasper area of the Rockies, where the rocket-fast three-mile runs start at the 10,000-ft. level. Other thrill-seekers slide down the Douglas and Drummond glaciers. But most of the skiing is done where most of the $50 million invested in ski lodges, inns, ski tows and slopes in Canada has been spent. That is the 50-mile sweep of rolling, easily accessible Laurentian Mountains, 40 miles north of Montreal. This winter Laurentian resort operators hope to rake in over $30 million from 300,000 skiers (125,000 of them from the U.S.).

Last week the weather reports from the Laurentians sounded forbidding to all but skiers. With three feet of snow already on the ground it was "snowing hard." And the special ski trains, first since 1940, rolled steadily north out of Montreal.

Some of the visitors stopped off at Shawbridge for the Big Hill run, others at any one of 100 lodges on up the line. Some put on their skis and pushed off along the 100-mile Maple Leaf Trail that linked most of the resorts.

New Contentment. To Americans, Quebec's best-known resort is Mont Tremblant, where lodge, inn and 60 cottages are laid out like a French Canadian village. Joseph ("Emperor Joe") Ryan, Philadelphia-born grandson of famed Thomas Fortune Ryan, has sunk $2,000,000 in Mont Tremblant since 1938, now grosses $600,000 a year from rates ranging from $7 to $14 a day (with meals).

Near Mont Tremblant's slopes and mile-long chair lift is the plushy Manoir Pinoteau, which features French cooking. A short run away is a more typical Laurentian resort: Gray Rocks Inn, a sprawling, homey frame house where the food is substantial, the rates low ($5 to $7 a day, including meals), and good slopes and trails start at the back door. There, as in most of the lodges, expert and duffer alike turn out for ski-school lessons at rates which average $2 for a half-day. There are scores of others, from the stucco Chalet Cochand to the simplest and cheapest French Canadian farmhouse.

As the thousands of well-heeled winter tourists poured in, Canadians, who sometimes complain about their cold country, were richly contented.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.