Adventures in ski land.

(For reference: Adelboden Piste Map)

Canuk and I got an early start today. We’ve been on every lift and piste in the Silleren-Metch area multiple times, so we headed over to Lenk today. It’s in the next valley over, and you can’t walk there over the mountains due to its steepness and the intervening wildlife preserve. You can drive up our valley, around the side of the lake, and back down that valley, or you can go on skis. We headed up from Oey to Eselmoos, Bergläger, and then Sillerenbühl, skied Aebi a few times for good measure, and headed over to Geils. We tried to take a shortcut, but it was closed, so we took Bühlberg up and skied over to Metschstand. After riding that lift, we skied the ridge by Metschberg and caught the Metsch-Lenk gondola into Lenk valley. The bus took us to the Lenk-Stoss-Leiterli gondola, where we could get onto all the Lenk pistes. They had some good off-piste areas by Hasler, and we also did the slalom course set up between Wallegg and Mülkerblatten. Off-piste off the slalom course was deep, deep powder, so we fell a lot and laughed at ourselves. Lenk is fun because there’s a sheer drop of the far right side and the paths all cross each other, so you can dodge around the mountain all day, picking your run at the last second. It was pretty empty, so we tried a lot of jumps and off-piste skiing. We also zipped past someone’s alp (small mountain outpost, often used for hay storage in the summer), ducking under the eaves as we came around the far side. At the end of the day, we rode the Balman t-bar a few times. There’s a tunnel for kids to ski through, and someone had set up a steep jump after a fast side trail. We both made our first attempt, then crashed mightily on the second. I wasn’t trying to slow down on the trail (and there wasn’t much space to do so anyhow), and I flew about three meters off the top of the jump. When Canuk stopped laughing long enough to make her own attempt, she came off sideways and never got her board back under her. No injuries, though I did lose my hat & Sonnenbrille. These pictures are, of course, the mountains around Lenk.

To get home, we skied down Stoss, then took the bus back to Lenk-Metsch gondola and went up Metschberg. We did most of the lifts on the way back, but you’re forced to ski at least Metschstand and Lavey, then take the red-black dropoff back to Silleren. If you can make it over fast enough, you can catch a black run and skip both Stand and Tanzboden. If you miss those lifts entirely, it’s back down to Aebi, which is fun in the late afternoon anyway. From Silleren, you can ski all the way down to Oey, in our home valley.

We had incredible weather and a ton of fun, so we’ll head out again tomorrow morning. I need to practice my snowboarding. We’re supposed to get a lot of snow again, and I’m better boarding in powder.