Skiing in the Alps

Hello again! I’m going to get two posts in back to back here. This past weekend (Feb. 15-17), I traveled to Munich to visit friends and go skiing in the Austrian Alps! Talk about incredible, this is it. Justin, Anton, Elizabeth, Lauren, and I left Just and Anton’s apartment building at 4:45am to catch the bus that was leaving at 5:45am. Way too early… We drove for about 2.5-3 hours, and finally arrived at the mountain! I was about to experience an entirely different caliber of skiing than the “hills” we ski on in Ohio and the mountain we used to ski on in West Virginia. It didn’t help that I hadn’t been skiing for three years or so.

Of course, at the start of the day, I was overly confident in my abilities. I used to be really good. How difficult can it really be to get back into it? The answer: quite difficult. I probably should have taken a little bit of time on the easy hills to get back into the swing of things, but it worked out okay. Haha! We skied several different routes down the mountain. Anton, Elizabeth, and I stuck to the easier ones before lunch, while Justin and Lauren went off on the harder hills. We all had a few good crashes. It’s actually pretty fun to wipe out on a mountain because the snow is fluffier, and it doesn’t really hurt. Admittedly, when I started to get tired and physically exhausted, I fell on purpose instead of stopping. Haha!

At noon, we stopped for lunch, which we ate at a restaurant at the top of the mountain! Awetastic! (It deserved its own word). You could look out the windows and see all of the mountains off in the distance, serving as a constant reminder that you were eating lunch at about 9000ft above sea level. I had a delicious pork schnitzel that hit the spot. It was a nice break from all of the hard work we were doing. :P

After lunch, we continued skiing down all the runs we could find. We found a ski lift that took us to the highest point of the mountain, and were able to see over the smaller peaks down to the city. It was quite a view. Unfortunately, it was quite cloudy, making the visibility limited. We skied and skied and then skied some more. I don’t know if it’s me getting older, being out of shape, or being a little bit sick, but I was getting sore. By the end of the day, I could barely even bring myself to turn my skis to stop. We were the last group to catch the lift up the mountain, which was an awesome feeling being up there with nobody behind us.

At one point in the afternoon, Anton and I were adventuring on our own. He saw a path from the ski lift in between two of the runs that had a few trees and looked like a nice little detour from the normal path. I followed the leader. We got to this part of the mountain and went off the beaten path, if you will. Unfortunately, we found that it was just huge piles of unpacked snow. My skis and his snowboard kept sinking into the snow, causing us to fall and causing me to lose my skis. Anton was ahead of me and was able to make it out before I could.

I was struggling my way through. At one point, I thought to myself, “Okay, if you go faster, you can glide over the top and make it down.” That worked for a short time. Then I saw a valley in front of me. I was heading downhill, and then it changed directions and went uphill again. Again, I thought, “You got this. No worries. Just lean back and try to lift the front end of your skis up, and go over it.” Please reference the very crude pictorial representation below of the events that transpired next:

No, I could not make it up the hill in front of me. Yes, I face-planted right into that giant pile of snow. Yes, I came out of it laughing. No, I don’t regret going down into that area because it was the funniest thing that happened to me that entire trip. I wish someone could have been there to videotape it.

Little did I know, Anton had made it out of the area and was calling for me. I couldn’t hear him, so I obviously wasn’t responding. On my end, I would try to walk, and fall into the snow up to my waste. I’m not going to lie, I thought at one point that I might fall into a crevice and be buried, unable to get out. So like any engineer would do, I laid on my stomach to disperse my body weight and used my skis to pull myself to safety. It was a totally logical thing to do. Haha! I finally heard Anton yelling for me, and I yelled back letting him know I was still working my way out. His reply, “I thought you died!” Overall, not the best decision we’ve ever made. Would I do it again? Probably not. Would I go back and change it? Absolutely not! (Please note: if I was actually buried in the snow for a period of time or I died, I would probably want to change my decision.)

Anyway, skiing in the Alps was an absolute blast, and I can’t wait to go again on March 2^nd!