Piste Piste A piste () is a marked ski run or path down a mountain for snow skiing, snowboarding, or other mountain sports. This European term is French ("trail", "track") and synonymous with 'trail', 'slope', or 'groomed run' in North America. The word is pronounced using a long "e" sound (e.g. rhymes with "beast"). Increasingly, North Americans employ its common European antonym, 'off piste', to describe backcountry skiing, especially when referring to skiing outside officially approved areas of a ski resort. Pistes are usually maintained using tracked vehicles known as snowcats to compact or "groom" the snow to even out trail
French language in Canada français commun constitue l’armature essentielle et efficace" ("there is no salvation beyond the mastery of its [the community's] linguistic means, of which common French constitutes the essential and effective weapon"). In general, the same norms as in common French are applied. Only certain words have a different gender. Notable from a semantic point of view are the use of the word "pis" for the conjunction "and", where "et" would be used in Metropolitan French; the word "là" to punctuate the end of a sentence or after a word; and the use of "à" instead of the possessive "de", for instance,