“How about that weather?!”

The 08/09 holiday account Part 2

The Alpin Hotel Enzian. A very nice place. On-piste, and the kids ski-school assembles on the doorstep every morning – couldn’t be better. Expensive tho! Still, I guess you get what you pay for – which is a lot. Enzian is the one in the middle here – it has many a feature, for the kids, none more important than the indoor swimming pool with glass walls so you can don your cozzie, have a splash and watch skiers zooming down the slope outside.

How’s that for a moody sky? Lovely stuff. See the precipitous drop behind the buildings…? That, my friends, is snow-chain territory! Not for sissies.

I had hoped for a very late morning given the excitement of the previous night, but you know, the kids had slept most of the journey and so were full of the joys before the sun came up – don’t you feel sorry for me?

Actually, we got down for breakfast at about 9, most people were already out, but Hayley’s colleague, Josef and his family were waiting for us. We caught up on the events of the trip up the hill and, after they had calmed themselves they went off for a ski.

We settled in for a nice breakfast!

This is Amber’s idea of a healthy breakfast. You can tell she loves it!

Fruit is much more appealing when it looks, and tastes like cake!

Sazza busy with her kwassso…

We were in no rush to leave the building, the food is good, the view out onto the mountains is even better and there are a full two weeks of snow and skiing ahead of us – paradise methinks.

Last night it snowed, today it is snowing some more, heavy skies overhead, but good enough viz for some decent skiing, which we accomplished.

The girls love the idea of building snowmen – its just the actual building of them that is not that interesting. What usually happens is that we decide to build one, then Hayley and I get to construct the thing while Amber and Saz frolic about “helping”. I’m not complaining mind you – I quite enjoy it.

On this occasion, the snow wasn’t balling at all well, so we went with a kind of towering approach…

This is Sarah building a snow man

This is Amber selecting a clump that looks like it could be a head

Saz didn’t think we had enough snow to construct the man, and so spent time mining for fresh snow nearby and bringing it in to add to the snowman.

After about an hour of construction and a very one-sided snow-fight our towering snowman was done – well all except for the spaghetti hair, coal eyes, carrot nose and so on.

When we arrived at the hotel, we parked in front of the place, not aware that there was under-cover parking for guests. For the past 2 days, I’ve been watching the car slowly become less visible beneath the gathering snow from the bedroom window.

Now for another of those firsts… I got a snow shovel from the gaffer and set out to liberate the car in fear that we wouldn’t be able to find it when we check out 2 days from now. Apart from the snow falling on everything, the car was parked (alongside others) close to the road that goes up, past the hotel. All the snow that falls on the road is graded aside each morning and during the day by the snow ploughs, just adding to the blockage.

Ours is the one in the middle. The bank of snow behind the cars is about 3 feet deep, on top – about a foot. This is the accumulation of 36 hours – I didn’t fancy what it would look like 2 more days hence – and it is still snowing.

Last year we took care to be fit for the ski season, running and weight training well in advance to make the most of the season, this year, we have done naught – and it is about to show… more than once.

Shovel in hand I eagerly anticipated the novelty of shovelling snow for the first time. So it was 12 below outside, but I was in my ski jacket and gloves, warm enough this time and under no pressure.

Snow scoops up well enough into the shovel, I had a massive one, it must have held at least 5kgs of snow at a time. I felt like singing Shosholoza as I hefted the powder spade after spade in the crisp air.

After the first 300kgs of snow, the novelty was beginning to wear off tho, and there was still a way to go. I took care to swing the snow as far out as I could, and got most of it clear, but the poor bugger parked to my right was going to have a lot more digging to do than I. About a ton of snow later, my lower back was lecturing me like a fish-wife, but at least the car was mobile. I left all the snow on the roof and hood, but cleared the glass and drove to the parking garage – you know every last flake of it was still there when we left.

On the way out, I had to stop and get a photo of this – there was a row of cars parked just below the hotel, some of them literally invisible under the snow. When it’s cold out you are well advised to lift your windscreepers to prevent them freezing to the glass – in this case it serves another purpose – if you can identify your car by it’s screepers that is!

The girls love eating snow. So much so, that we often have to stop them from eating stuff that has past it’s “Best Before” date if you know what I mean. Our balcony was under about 3 feet of snow, and after the girls had scooped most of what they could get off of the window sills, it was out onto the balcony with their glasses to get more.

Amber is eating hers off of her tooth brush… aye. As happy as…

Some of the icicles hanging down from the roof of the balcony – look at them mountains!

Solden is a stunning place – as far as skiing is concerned, much better than Stubai, but I’ll get back to that later. It has that spaciousness that we found on the slopes in the Grand Massive – I think the widest piste I have ever seen is here, there’s a lovely fast blue that runs down to the middle station that has to be several hundred meters wide.

And wherever you look, there is just the most beautiful scenery – we’ll be back here often I hope.

Ok, so cloudy is not the best for skiing, but this is not so hard on the eyes!

We need to move to an apartment lower down the hill (below snow-chain country) for the second part of our week. Apartment Rangger it is – self catering now, no more half-board, but clean, spacious apartments, this is one place we’ll come back to. Here’s the view from the balcony looking over Solden town.

Bugz getting ready to go – you can see the glacier in the background. If this looks cold, it isn’t – cold happened a long time ago. With the wind chill, its probably about –25 out there, you literally need to pace thaw-stops into your day. It’s not an all-over cold, the clothes take care of the body, and 4 layers is cozy warm on top, but the toes, fingers and face… these take a pounding. Many a Km we skid grasping extra hard onto ski poles coz you can’t actually feel them properly your fingers are so numb.

For the first few days we didn’t venture to the top of the hill – I think the highest skiable point here is 3333m – because of the cloud. On a previous visit we tried it, got caught in thick cloud, abandoned the ascent, and almost literally had to feel our way down the hill again. That attempt was made with the kids in tow – as you might imagine, trying to get blind babies to ski is not easy.

This time, attempting it ourselves was going to be better. The sky was clear and the weather crisp as we made the trip. The higher we went up the hill, the more the wind blew, one some occasions, it was strong enough that you’d have to turn away from it to be able to breathe. At the top station the temperature was radically colder than the mid-slopes of –15 or so that we’d been skiing, I don’t know what it was precisely, but you can take my word for it! The lift station at the top had these curious snow-growths attached like barnacles on the hull of a ship, or maybe more like coral on rock.

Somehow, the driven snow gains purchase on a spot on the glass or wall and then begins to grow – see some growing in the middle of clear glass? It was all the creativity I could muster to frame the mountains in the mirror before I sacrificed a digit to the cold.

We are under 4 layers of clothing, and these little snow-growths began to form on our ski jackets! Blasted on initially by the wind, or perhaps, the escaping moisture from a warm(ish) body beneath was simply freezing on contact with the air.

This is what it looks like from the top of the hill – see how deep the mountains go…

The trip down was interesting in part because of the cold – our goggles froze over completely, so that looking through them was worse than trying to look through a heavily frosted pane of glass. The wind, whipping up snow into those drifts you see in documentaries on the Arctic, made the use of goggles essential. Snow in the eyes is not pleasant on a good day, snow blasting the eyes is unbearable. We had to stop to try and clear the visors. At first, scratching the ice off seemed a good way to go, but was messy, and seemed so abrasive as to score the visors, so was abandoned. I decided to make the trip down using eyelashes to keep the snow out and let in just enough visual to stay on the mountain, Hayley though can’t do things like this, so I began licking the ice off her goggles. The strategy was effective, but not really elegant, the spit re-froze in seconds, so a lick and wipe process was used to get the worst off – at least it got us down the slope.

The other thing that contributed to making the trip down so interesting was attempting the most severe black run we have ever encountered. We ski’d the alternative long blue route down, and it is great fun, but there is nothing like a nice challenging black to get you going. At the top of most slopes, you can see something of what is coming up – not here – you can see the slope disappear and then reappear 1500m later. I chuckled to myself as we went over – you fall once on a slope like this and you get up at the bottom. It is so steep that, the snow you disturb during a turn comes with you down the slope, rolling along the surface beside you. As it happened, the gradient actually got steeper mid-way down so that standing in a moderately tight turn, I could put my hand out and touch the mountain. An un-groomed slope like this would be avalanche material – certainly off limits for our skill level. It was hectic with a capital “huh!” Obviously we had to do it again… it was lovely.

Towards the bottom of the most severe part I was taken completely by surprise as not one, but many skiers came past in schus mode – i.e. 90 degrees to the slope, or in open carves – in either case they must have been approaching the speed of sound on their descent – madness, until I can do it you understand…

It’s hard to convey a sense of the steepness involved, but this is what I am talking about.

See you in part 3…