Winning an Olympic gold in hooky

CLAVIERE, Italy -- So why should the ski writer of the largest daily newspaper in New England feel guilty taking a few hours off to go skiing?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my colleagues were already at work at other Turin Olympic venues or sleeping in after covering late-night events such as figure skating or bobsled.

Whatever, here were some early hours of bright sunlight stolen to ride the lift into the magnificent heights surrounding Claviere, an idyllic village on the French border.

For the first few days here, the brown earth in the hills above Turin was only streaked with snow, giving a graphic feel for the drought conditions here the last two years.

But during the first full weekend of the competition the snows began, a few inches every night. By the time we came out of the hotel each morning the big John Deere plows and sunshine had done their work and the streets were bare, but the Fiats and Volkswagens wore a blanket of new powder.

It was a gorgeous sight, even on mornings when the snow was heavy and we boarded busses for the ride down from Claviere along the switchback roads to the valley town of Cesara, where busses go off to venues in every direction.

But not this morning. My event coverage was late, so my one job after breakfast was to ride into the mountains of La Via Lattea (the Milky Way), a region of the Piedmont Alps combining Saux D'Oulx (freestyle events), Sestriere (men's Alpine), San Sicario (women's Alpine), Claviere, and Montgenevre.

The other job was trying to meet up with a friend, Shauna, who was coming from San Sicario via snowboard. In this world of medieval stone churches and centuries-old stone walls through the forest, we were trying to hook up using that ubiquitous high-tech device -- the cellphone.

I arrived at the summit of Mount Gimont and the warm air of the valley had gone chilly and rare, with bright sunshine making it feel like the Rockies. All around, peaks of the Alps soared against a powder blue sky. From that height I looked west toward the Po River valley, which played an important role in both World War I and World War II.

Since college I have been under the spell of Ernest Hemingway's war writing, starting in WWI, when the fighting raged in these mountains. But being here had brought the realization that folks come here for the sport and beauty, and, masterfully written as they are, there is nothing romantic about Papa's scenes of rocket bombardment and ambulance lorries piled up with bodies. Heroic, but hardly romantic.

Europeans combine the sport of skiing with lifestyle more than Americans do. At the top of every lift a bar awaits -- offering everything from focaccia and tomato sandwiches to espresso to hot red wine. Up here I saw the first wineskin since my college days at Sugarloaf. No, Bode Miller is not wrong about the culture of skiing.

And European skiers generally respect boundaries and like to stay on the groomed piste and out of the trees. So even two days after the last snowfall, wearing a pair of rented 165 Atomic twin tips, I found lots of fresh powder in the forest, and not a few old walls and stumps. There are no restraints from skiing into the woods, and even when you can see the trail switching back below through the trees, it is thought an oddity here to take pleasure skiing powder in the trees.

Shauna finally showed up, riding a snowboard, this, too, was cause for curiosity, since snowboards in many parts of Europe are rare and considered a fad. But silky snow and sunny slopes are a staple, and even stopping for lunch in the shadow of a 500-year-old stone church, the pizza and red wine of the region seemed to be in character.

Later, skiing alone, I ended up across the French border in Montgenevre. I had taken a tree route again, but instead of finding the trail back to the lift I ended up on the two-lane road back to Claviere. Though I hate to walk on pavement in ski boots, I set off with skis on my shoulder, coming shortly to the border.

''Passport?" the guard asked.

''I don't have it," I said. ''It's in my hotel right there in Claviere." I showed him my press pass and pointed to the hotel down the road.

''Aahh," he said, looking at the credential I wore around my neck with a photo and passport number. ''This is very serious problem, no passport."

Just as I was about to get out my cellphone and dial the International Olympic Committee press liaison number, I noticed a couple of young Caribinieri in the guard house laughing it up at my expense, and then the guard questioning me broke up himself. This was a fairly common skier mistake, and they get a bang out of hassling lost tourists, however mildly. But as I trudged on to my hotel, realizing that one cannot stay annoyed when an Italian laughs like that, I wondered if it hadn't been a pretty good idea after all, here on the border of France, to be wearing my ski hat bearing the Norwegian flag.