Skiing.

Skiing was a bit rough on Wednesday. This is the kind of weather we had, and a decent picture of what Adelboden looks like. It didn't stop snowing all night, so they hadn't had the chance to groom all the runs. Those they had groomed still had powder piling up on them. I went up early with Finn, and she showed me her favorite runs. We had a pretty good day of it, though my quads got tired by about 15:00 from a combination of prior disuse and hacking through all that powder. We had the brilliant idea of tackling an ungroomed run earlier in the day--we made it about a kilometer before we gave up and climbed through chest-high snow to the access road. It was like a combination of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing with broken snowshoes, and we figured we couldn't make it the rest of the way without losing too much ski time. We took the higher lifts when they opened, but the wind was so strong at the top that I felt I was being scoured. Finn pointed her skis away from the run and I watched as the force of the snowstorm actually pushed her uphill. We headed down in a hurry and kept to the Silleren area for the rest of the day. This is one of the gondolas above the river on the way home.


We came back in the late afternoon, stuffed ourselves with tuna pie, and suited up again for night sledging. This time, we set out with Brazil, SAussie, and SAussie's boyfriend as well. When we'd dragged our toboggans up to the Tschenten lift (the lower lift into town closes at 18:00), we found the night sledging canceled due to the weather. We'll come back another time. They have a good 15 km of lit sledge trails, including one long, 7km run. Instead, we headed to one of the town's sledge areas and flew down by the light of our headlamps. Afterwards, we held a snowfight with lots of good tackling and dragging, program department versus administration. This, of course, caused a piercing need for heisse Schocolade. We go for hot chocolate at least once per day here, sometimes up to thrice.

Today was all I could have hoped for. I stayed home while four of the others took off on another early morning, but I caught up with them after breakfast. I'd promised Brazil I'd start teaching her to ski before I set out for the day. She had never seen snow before this week, so it was a tall order. She's never skated either. She's scared to go downhill. I did teach her a few ways to hike back uphill after she slips, plus two ways to stop. She got good at standing back up after crashing whilst on my watch, but she never quite mastered snapping her boots into the bindings. I kept having to reach down and brush snow off her boots, then manually latch them onto the skis. We'll try again in a few days.

After the lesson, I packed a lunch and headed to the lift. It's easy to get up to the mountain here. After a snow, we can just ski (or sledge, or skibock, et cetera) down the road to Oey, at the base of the valley. There's a lift in Oey that takes you either up to town or all the way up to Silleren, with a couple of stops at easier areas on the way. Silleren's got great skiing, so I stayed there for a while before heading higher up the mountains. This is from the top of one of my favorite runs. There's a good ski map of the local pistes we can use to plan ahead, plus they've got those boards with lights indicating open lifts all around the slopes and on Adelboden's main street.

At the end of the day, I met up with SAussie and Finn. We headed back to the Chalet to soak in the clawfoot tubs and get a bit of work done. I can't wait till my next day off. I might try to blend in with the locals--they sunbathe in full ski gear at the lifts and ski restaurants. I sat down for a moment by the little slalom, but it was tough to stay seated with all those runs in front of me.

Oh, and my accomplishment of the day was asking the lift ticket woman if my card was good at all the areas around here and how many points each type of ski lift cost, then buying the proper lift card for the rest of the season, all in German. I'm trying to get Finn and Dutch to speak to me in German so I can practice.