Sorry for the gap in posts. I was in Utah visiting some family and skiing with my boyfriend. It was lovely: great weather, great snow, great company, tons of piste and good glades. Unusually, it was almost entirely scrape-free. So I thought I might relate a ski trip from my past which wasn't.
One can really get into scrapes skiing. One could fall and break bones, tear ligaments, get concussions, or otherwise be injured. Or one could have chairlift disasters like having your skis fall off (I have done that) or dropping a pole or glove (yup) or my absolute favourite:
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| For the record, this was not me. |
I have never had normal scrapes. I hope that’s clear by now. No, I have interesting and ditzy scrapes that involve strange transgressions no one would have thought to prepare for. One of these occurred while skiing solo in Switzerland—something I will never do again. Here’s why.
Ski resorts in New England, where I am from, are laid out in a particular way:
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| All trails lead to the bottom! |
As you can see, there are a series of chairlifts that service particular trails and altitudes. If, from any particular one of these lifts, you decide to ski all the way to the bottom, you will eventually hit an easy trail that will take you back to the central collecting point at the main ski lodge. This will be a place where one can obtain food, rental equipment, first aid, trail maps, beer, your car, or whatever else you might be searching for over the course of your skiing experience. Even at the posh resorts in the States, where the area is spread out over several mountains, they work this out either by creating one of those collecting trails to take you back to the central base or by building lift or rope tow access. So no matter where you go, it’s hard to get seriously, 100% lost. You can accidentally get yourself onto a trail too difficult for your skills, but you can usually scrape your way down to something easier and eventually find your way down to the bottom. Then you perspire with fear for awhile and get over it. At the end of the day, you are not stranded on the mountain for the simple reason that they make sure no one is left on the lifts, and you can always ski down to the car park area. Job done.
This is not the case in Switzerland. Or at least, not in Grindelwald, where I skied a few years ago. Here I was stymied by a few things—I don’t speak German or French, and I didn’t have a companion who would moderate my natural tendency toward idiocy. But most of all, it was the layout of the slopes that got me.
See, the problem here was, you’re not supposed to SKI down to where you started the day. You take the lift up to a given area, and then STAY up there using only the high-level lifts. This is totally alien to my mind. I’m used to, on a whim, skiing downhill for a thousand feet to my point of origin and then going alllllll the way up again. So the notion that I could not ski down to the carpark where I had to meet my skiers’ shuttle at the end of the day just never occurred to me.
At some point, therefore, I thought I would get a nice long run in to the bottom of the gondola and then take it all the way back up. So I skied down and down and down, trying to keep the gondola as close as possible on my right. Eventually I started feeling sneakishly uncomfortable, like I was maybe missing something. Especially when I started having to lump my way across semi-snowed-up roads on my skis to get to the trail again on the other side. And finally, when I was level with the gondola station, I realized I was miles away along a road. So I had to take my skis off, throw them over my shoulder, and start walking.
I took the gondola up again. Did you think that was the end of the story, or that I’d learned my lesson? Please. This is me we’re talking about. I don’t have those kinds of reasoning skills. I was still clinging to my notion that you can ALWAYS ski down to the bottom, a notion that had been instilled in me over years of skiing in America. I was not going to let go of it just because I’d messed up one gondola-locating effort. No no no, what I actually did was think to myself, hmm, it would be really wise to know exactly how to get down at the end of the day, so let’s try skiing down again!
This second attempt went very badly. I tried going down a new route this time, keeping the gondola on my left side. At this point, my German non-language skills came into play, and I passed a suspicious sign at the head of a trail. It had writing on it but damned if I have a clue what it said.
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| Potentially an accurate translation? |
Now, in an American ski area, this could mean “Caution, Experts Only” or something similar. Turns out in Switzerland, it means “Trail Closed”. Of course, I skied straight down it blithely. This led to a tiny, two-foot-wide trail at the edge of a gorge with a 40-foot vertical drop o n the left and a 40-foot vertical wall on the right, and nowhere to stop or turn till the trail finally rose back onto a wider meadow area. I stood around there for awhile, thinking, Jesus, the Swiss are hard core. Then I continued downhill, at which point I began running out of snow.
At this point I finally accepted that I had messed up again. Once more, I hoisted my skis onto my shoulder. However, at this point, I was looking at a steep downhill stumble on thick mud studded with semi-frozen cow pats, rather than a stroll along a road. While wearing ski boots. If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s roughly like wearing Transformer parts on your legs, only with less flexibility. So of course it was about thirty seconds before I slipped and went flop into some malodorous cow mud. I slid downhill about six feet, dropping my skis in the process, till I managed to stop and trundle back uphill to fetch my gear. Half an hour of slogging, cursing, and stinking of cow finally took me back to the base of the gondola where, for the third time that day, I boarded and rode back up to the ski area. I skied for a few more hours, getting more and more worried about the end of the day, when finally I overheard a family group speaking English to one another. I dashed over and asked them how to get down to the bottom of the hill.
Turns out you’re supposed to take the gondola.
And just as a final insult., when I finally did take said gondola down to where the skier’s shuttle was to pick me up and take me back to Interlaken, the shuttle driver refused to let me on because I was covered in mud. He pointed me toward a snow bank and told me to roll around in it to remove the essence-of-cow—or he wouldn’t let me onto the bus.
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| There are only a few circumstances in which a snowbank is a valid bathtub. This would be one of them. |
