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The North Face Ski Challenge Tour heads back down to France and will hold its last qualifying event in Chamonix on March 12th on the famous Grands Montets. Now we knew entering in the last north face denali fleece of the qualifiers in Scandinavia and France that we would have even bigger crowds trying to qualify for the final in Val Thorens. But apparently, The North Face Ski Challenge, a combined event in freeride and freestyle dedicated to young freeskiers aged 12 to 18 had already attracted some attention in the country of the mighty vikings!

It all started when we arrived in ?re and turned on the local TV. Last year’s final in Val Thorens was on and every 20 minutes, the moderator on the local TV explained the whole idea of the event encouraged locals and skiers on vacation on site to come and participate. The next day,cheap north face， we entered the Stadium shop in the center of town and 8 kids were waiting for us. And more came during the whole evening!

“What if I crash ? How many runs do we have ? Can we take two pairs of skis?” And so on and so on. Three hours later and after having answered probably to 300 questions, the result exceeded our expectations: 42 boys and 3 girls would participate the next day in the event. A record for us, especially since we had decided last summer to only accept 40 kids in each event by lack of time.

Then next day (Saturday) the weather decided to remind us that we indeed were in Sweden: gusty winds, heavy snow falls and north face denali were our menu for the day. And you know it’s going to be tough when you need to put your googles on just to walk to your car!

Arriving at the meeting point, a huge chalet on the slopes, it got even worse. But nothing scares off a Viking as Robert and P?r, the local event managers reassured us: “ We have trees pretty much everywhere: the wind won’t be a problem. And at 10 AM, the weather is supposed to get better”. They were right about the first part. As for the second part; well, let’s say that if we didn’t like the weather, we only had to wait 10 minutes to see it change!