This Is What Happens When You Unleash 500 Singles on an IRL Date

It’s a bluebird day at Val Thorens in France, the highest ski resort in Europe, and there’s still an hour and a half till the lifts close. But unlike your diehard last-chair Rockies skier, we’ve abandoned our skis. We’ve traded the lift lines for the queues at La Folie Douce, a famous outdoor bar above a steep blue run.

To my left, a group of skiers in Hogwarts regalia bops along to house music. Artificial fog engulfs the group on the table in front of me, where a flannel-clad man is dancing in front of the crowd. He and his friends are doing lewd things with a six-liter bottle of rosé—550 euros—and taking turns drinking straight out of it. A woman sways in black sequined pants. In the right lighting, she could be mistaken for a disco ball.

“Champagne… shower. Champagne… SHOWER,” the DJ starts to chant from a balcony overlooking the wooden deck, slowly building speed and volume. He waves for the crowd to join in.

“Champagne… shower,” we chant back. “Champagne… shower. Champagne… SHOWER. CHAMPAGNE—” and then we get what we want: three bottles are popped and fizz rains from the balcony. We scream and duck, but there’s nowhere to hide from the spray. We’re packed in tighter than ski bums jockeying for the first tram of the morning.

We’re above treeline, surrounded by views of sharp, snow-covered peaks, yet the Alps are forgotten. The mountains aren’t the point—they’re the vehicle.

I haven’t come for a typical ski vacation with close friends or even vague acquaintances. I’m here on a singles trip. Over 400 bachelors and bachelorettes have flown in to party for a sleepless week with hot, available strangers. Nearly half the skiers are from the UK, and a surprising number have come from across the United States. The ski trip is hosted by a dating company called Thursday, in partnership with British ski-trip operator NUCO Travel, and it’s offered at a bargain-basement price. For seven nights of lodging, a six-day lift ticket, and organized dating and mingling events, packages start at around $830. You can barely ski a weekend in Breckenridge, Colorado, for that price.

The catch? Almost everyone is sleeping on twin-size beds, in shared bedrooms in small apartments, with strangers. It’s Love Island, on skis, for real people.

Matt McNeill Love and George Rawlings, old friends, co-founded Thursday in London in 2021, starting with a singles’ matching app that worked only on Thursdays—noncommittal Londoners’ night of choice for first dates. They got the idea when Rawlings broke up with his girlfriend before a romantic ski trip and ended up bringing McNeill Love instead.

I had just moved to London when Thursday started putting up billboards around the city, and I was intrigued. The idea for the app was great, but it paled in comparison to the singles-only events the company ran around the city every week. In the first three years of Thursday, I went to cocktail bars, a ball-pit-themed nightclub, a climbing gym, and a running club. They recently shut down the app to focus exclusively on those events, which they now hold in 78 cities around the world. Most are one-off meetups, but the company has a lot more trips in the works.

The next trip, in May, is in Bali. Soon there may also be hiking trips, backpacker-style adventures around Asia, and hotel takeovers across the U.S. While the ski trip attracts a mostly hetero crowd, the company runs queer-focused singles nights in the cities where they operate. Thursday wants people to celebrate being single, McNeill Love (who is not single) tells me.

“Being single shouldn’t be a negative thing, because it hopefully won’t last forever,” he says. “Therefore, it shouldn’t be dreaded, it should be embraced. We do so many campaigns around how being single means you can stay out whenever you want, or go on that holiday. You don’t need to think about anybody else. It’s an exciting time to put yourself first and really learn about yourself.”

And it’s a great time to meet other unencumbered people who love the same things you do.

This is the third year Thursday has hosted the ski trip. Everyone is welcome, McNeill Love says, but the typical attendees are men seeking women and vice-versa. The average age of the trip I’m on is 28. I’m 33.

When I heard about the first Thursday ski trip in 2023, I put down a deposit immediately. I had only skied once—and barely—since tearing my ACL on a blue run in 2016, but I wasn’t in it for the skiing; I was in it for the skiers.

Like a lot of people in their early thirties, I haven’t found a lot of success on dating apps. Until I deleted it in November, my Hinge profile was full of the sort of adventure porn that’s requisite for Colorado, where my last serious relationship ended. In London, being outdoorsy is more novel than normal.

Everyone here “loves traveling” and is “just looking for someone to explore the world with!” but backpackers, climbers, and general rugged outdoorsmen are in short supply. The only camping most people do is in fields, on drugs, at music festivals. I had no trouble getting likes and matches, but often men seemed more interested in my lifestyle than in me. I’m an independent freelance travel writer who regularly plans international trips with barely a week’s notice. There are a lot of men on dating apps who “want” to travel the world together, and very few who actually will. A ski trip seemed like a far more efficient way to vet lumberjack-adjacent men whose hiking boots may or may not be ornamental.

Unfortunately, a few weeks after paying that deposit, I met a rugged outdoorsman who moonlit as a banker. When it came time to pay the rest of the bill, the relationship was too new to be serious, but too promising to ship off for a singles holiday in good conscience. I withdrew from the trip and then, days later, he dumped me.

Classic.

Something similar—a whiplash romance at exactly the wrong time—happened again last year. I was devastated. I could have been flirting with sexy single skiers, and instead I was literally cleaning up the mess from a brief relationship with someone who burned oatmeal in my very expensive titanium pot. So this time I came up with a watertight Plan B: if I ended up falling in love before the ski trip, then I’d go as an anthropologist to observe and make new friends. Best-case scenario, I’d arrive single, meet my soulmate, and come home with a great story. Worst-case scenario, I’d spend the week getting sexiled from a shared bedroom as if I were back in college and still come home with a great story.

NUCO agreed to host me to write about my experience, I booked my flights, and it was settled: I was going. It was the most committed I have been in five years.

Days -3 to 0

A few days before I leave for Val Thorens, I make a rookie mistake.

“I’m not talking to the press,” a ski-trip alum posts in the trip WhatsApp chat when he sees on Instagram that I—a journalist—have been deployed to report. “What happens on ski trip stays on ski trip.” (Later, he’ll demand to be in the headline.)

Getting busted is probably for the best: I’d been reluctant to out myself as a writer because I didn’t want to end up playing wallflower, but I suppose journalistic ethics should apply even in the hot tub. I resolve to make some ground rules that mainly boil down to “Do no harm.” I won’t hide that I’m here as a journalist, but I won’t shout about it either. I won’t name anyone or share identifying details without permission. Meanwhile anything that I do, or that happens to me: fair game.

As a survival mechanism, the women break off into a gals-only chat, which assumes the safe-space atmosphere of a women’s bathroom. While the mixed chats devolve into spaces for laddish toilet jokes, innuendos, and obsessions with drinking, the gals dissect the men without restraint.

“Do they think we can’t read?” I ask. We wonder why they behave like this, talking about shagging, drinking, and bidets, in front of women they’ll soon be paired with on the “Chairlift of Love.” Aren’t they supposed to want to impress us? The ratio—roughly 53 to 46—is tipped in our favor. It’s in their interest to shape up.

To keep them in line, someone starts a spreadsheet, a color-coded, communal record to document the boys’ sins in real time: name, phone number, red flags. Redeeming qualities, if and when applicable. Before we meet, we already have a few on the warning list.

Day 1

The meet-and-greet starts on the plane at London Heathrow, where we’re stuck on the tarmac before takeoff. The Thursday trippers gather in the aisle to put faces to our group texts. At passport control in Geneva, a woman admits to telling one of the guys about the spreadsheet on the flight.

As people arrive, the spreadsheet dominates conversation. Everyone wants to know who’s on it, a ski trip alum from England tells me later.

“The fear of being on the spreadsheet was astonishing,” he says. They worry that if they get flagged, they’ll be out of luck, shunned by women for the entire week.

But after our first official gathering, when hundreds of us crowd into a bar called Saloon, there’s more talk of green flags than red. We swap notes on who the good guys are and add them to the list.

Day 2

Now that we’re on the mountain, the group chat serves a purpose. I’m looking for a buddy for some easy runs, and an American guy who flew here from New York agrees to meet me.

It takes only about five minutes to get from group chat to lift line, so we have no context about each other before we meet. All I know is his first name and that he’s a snowboarder in a black jacket.

“Bright green helmet, white goggles, blue ski jacket,” I text, and then he spots me and calls my name. That’s it, that’s the pretext. We ski onto the lift together.

We’re all wearing pink Thursday buffs to brand ourselves as single, but I’m unsure of the protocol. By the nature of being here, are we… on a date? Or are we just two people who’d rather not ski alone? There’s no immediate spark, but he seems great. Green flag, I decide.

We ski down to après together for hot wine and someone smears glitter on my cheeks. I run into the guy who outed me in the group, and he jokes about watching what he says in front of the journalist. I fail to conjure any of the witty remarks I had prepared for this occasion, so instead we start talking about spas. It occurs to me then that I’ve never seen a dating show that doesn’t involve bikinis.

“Who wants to go to the spa?” I text the group, which now has over 330 members. “I hear there is a spa.”

Two hours later, I’m in the sauna with a snowboarder I met at the airport in Geneva. He can’t really handle the heat, but he’s determined not to break before me.

I tell him it’s not a competition, and then I win.

Day 3

The Chairlift of Love, an organized speed-dating event, turns out to be a gondola ride with strangers. As we wait to find out how we’ll be paired with our future spouses, I’m too confident. I’ve never done speed dating before, but I’m good on first dates. I’m more concerned about boredom than unrequited attraction.

After the first pair is sent off, the event host asks for another volunteer.

“Me!” I shout, and my arm shoots up like Hermione Granger’s in potions class. I imagine these men will trip over their skis to go on a date with me, but then consider that I may be too interested in an ego boost. I think about The Bachelorette. Am I here for the right reasons?

I forget to take off my key lime helmet before I shuffle in front of the crowd, and realize too late that this is not the hottest first impression. I try to remove my goggles one-handed while also trying not to drop my poles, and succeed only at messing up my hair.

“Who wants to go on a date with Kassie?” the host asks. I’m wearing an eighties Style France ski suit, and the silence is louder than my electric-blue lapels. No one trips. No one falls.

Just before I start to panic that I’ll be voted off the slopes, at least two hands go up in quick succession. There is no competition, however; I’m sent off with the first guy who volunteered.

“Thanks for—” I start to say, on a fishing expedition for him to say how excited he is to meet me.

“Yeah,” he says quickly, and I realize he thinks he’s taken one for the team. It would have been so awkward if no one volunteered, he adds.

Touché—I am humbled.

We climb into a gondola with two men who are probably twice our age. When I finally get my helmet off, my date looks relieved, and when he takes off his, I am too—he’s cute. He pulls out the prompt cards the organizers gave us and reads the first one.

“How do you approach the idea of growing old with someone, and what are your expectations?”

The card is literally labeled “intense,” and so are the other three they’ve given us. We decide to just roll with it and answer earnestly. After four and a half minutes, it feels like we’ve been on an entire dinner date.

“Was it love at first sight?” the host asks us, on camera, when we make it back down to the lift. Yeah, maybe, we say, and it does feel like there’s a spark. But I came here for the sport of dating, and I want to play again.

“I’m glad I got to ski with the cute girl!” he shouts as he skis away.

Day 4

Last night, the bar was so packed, I had to climb onto a bench just to have somewhere to stand. It was fun for a minute but not my vibe, so I left with a snowboarder and discovered the bowling alley. I turn my “spa chat” into an “also bowling” group and somehow wrangle 22 people to fill three lanes.

“You’ve created your own dating event,” one of my new friends says after we divide the group up. It wasn’t my intention, but she’s not wrong. I learn later that our air-hockey doubles tournament ignited at least one spark.

Day 5

There’s a new question tacked on to introductions now: “So, have you found love yet?”

That’s the first thing someone asks me when he introduces himself at the group dinner up on the mountain this evening, then tells me he hasn’t found love yet either.

This is what most of the men say when I ask what they’ve been up to. I hear about some crushes and some vague tales of hookups, but no budding romances. That’s not really why most people are here, anyway, or at least they’re not willing to admit it. Most people tell me they just wanted to ski, and this seemed like a good way to do it, cheaply, around other people who might be a lot of fun. But of course they say that, McNeill Love says, and his reasoning makes sense: it’s not cool to go around declaring that you’re sick of being single and you really want to meet someone.

“It’s deeply personal to people,” he says. “In big group settings, it’s just easier to be like, ‘Oh, I’m just here to have fun. I don’t really care.’”

That’s what I said too, when I tried to justify my interest in a trip that set out to be messy.

“That sounds horrible,” a lot of my friends said, when I asked if they wanted to come with me. Sharing a room with strangers? No, thank you. “Literally, you could not pay me.”

And sure, I could be paid (full disclosure: I was), but I didn’t need to be. It’s rough out there, on the apps. It’s a bunch of people telling you who they think you want them to be, rather than showing you who they are. I didn’t expect to fall in love on a raucous singles ski trip, but I certainly would not mind it.

Late at night, after I ski home from the dinner up on the slopes, I scroll through the group chat and see that someone’s asking for photos from “the wedding.”

Apparently, a guy asked someone to marry him after she gave him a granola bar on a lift, and she said, yeah, sure, why not. So they sent out invitations and threw a ceremony, white dress and all. It was just a joke, I think, but I never got the whole story.

All week, we create our own weather. It’s exhilarating to trade gossip about what’s going on between people who exist to us only within the context of this resort. We play telephone and the rumors grow increasingly wild. I hear about a threesome and a failed attempt at a premeditated orgy.

In which bunk bed? I wonder.

Day 6

Today is retro ski day, but I’ve got food poisoning or some kind of plague, so I sleep for 18 hours, right through the parade. When I wake up, half a dozen people are checking in on me, asking what I need.

There are dozens of texts about plans for the evening and I can’t handle the FOMO, so around 9 P.M. I drag myself out of bed for a trip to Saloon, the Thursday bar for the evening. I don’t last long there. On my way out, I say goodbye to two new friends, one of whom is wearing a red sweater dress.

My roommate has met someone, so I kill time where else but in the bowling alley. On my way out, I recognize the dress I noticed at the bar, but now one of the guys is wearing it.

“They won’t let me have my clothes back!” he shouts, and no one can explain to me why the two of them swapped clothes in the first place. He has to win in order to earn back his jeans, and he’s not bowling well. As a Hail Mary, he calls a woman he met during our bowling night, who decimated everyone else. She has no idea what’s going on when she shows up for the emergency assist, but she bowls anyway: a strike.

It’s not until the last night of the trip that I hear this final detail, and it ends up being my favorite story from the week. Even if no one ends up meeting their future spouse, we’ve had a great time. We’ve gotten exactly what we said we’ve come for.

Day 7

I show up for one last round of gondola dating, but it’s a little late to start a trip romance now. Instead I accept a packet of prompt cards for a “speed date” with someone I already know, who I met in the passport line at the airport on the first day.

“Here, this one’s not so bad,” he says when he flips through the prompt cards, which are all intense. “When was your first kiss, your first love, your first time?”

There are four gray-haired men in the lift with us, so we keep it light and then focus on the views. The sky is cerulean and we can see for miles, so we take lifts as high as we can go, till we can see over the other side of the mountain. I can’t remember ever having a better day on skis.

In the afternoon, we split up and I head to La Folie Douce to meet other friends. When I arrive, it’s clear why it’s considered the world’s best après. Somehow it’s both chill and electrifying. Within minutes, every table is covered in skiers. One guy whips off his shirt.

It’s a daily tradition to assemble along the ridge of an upper slope to watch skiers tumble down the mountain after drinking at Folie, so I head out after the champagne shower to spectate. The crowd oohs and jeers every time there’s a fall or collision.

At least one pair does that insane thing where a snowboarder lies belly-down on their friend’s skis, so they can put their board up for the skier to use as a seat. They don’t make it very far before they crash too, but they seem all right. The frequency of falls is astounding, and we Americans can’t believe no one is getting sued.

Day 8—and Beyond

When I check out of the hovel that masqueraded for the week as a hotel, it’s the most chaotic morning I’ve seen yet. It’s 8:58 A.M. and I have to be out 13 minutes ago, even though my bus back to Geneva isn’t for two more hours.

I turn in my key to the guy at the front desk, where I’m advised that the management may retain our security deposit if our room isn’t clean enough. I remind him that our room was not cleaned before we arrived. There was dried coffee in one of the mugs, and at least one pan looked like it had been cleaned with butter rather than soap. He shrugs and tells me that this is just how it is.

“It’s a big building,” he says.

I send a voice note to my British housemates back home in London, documenting the week, the lobby mayhem, and the pile of French fries squished into the concrete just outside the building’s front door.

“This is the European ski experience,” one of my housemates replies, laughing. As I listen to her message, I walk out of the luggage room straight through a cumulonimbus vape cloud hanging in the lobby. “That is what it is, babes. It’s absolute carnage.” She pauses to reflect on her countrymen. “I don’t know whether I’m proud or embarrassed.”

Then again, what else would you expect from over 400 twenty- and thirtysomethings relegated to dorm-style living? It’s just like school: the slopes are our classes, and the bars are our team sports.

There’s been a lot of complaining about organizational chaos, miscounted hotel stars, and the loudest men in the group chat. But I think it would have been less fun if all of that had been better. I haven’t met anyone who seems insecure about being single, and I’m heading home feeling kind of grateful to still be part of the club.

I’d hate to miss out on next year.

Want more of Outside’s in-depth longform stories? Sign up for the Long Reads newsletter.