Bright day

This morning I woke up from the sun before my alarm woke me as usual, but what was unusual was that I also got out of bed before 0830. I had a leisurely shower and went down to breakfast early enough to see some people I hadn't met before: a large group from Ireland. The Swedes joined as I was settling in to breakfast. It turned out they had not gone to Lech after all but stayed to ski in Stuben. They only got there when the clouds had already filled it up. I invited myself to ski with them this morning, until lunch.

It was a bright, sunny day today: the first I've seen since I got here. I skied with the Swedes actually for most of the day. For the first time we could see what the mountains looked like. I took many pictures, today and a few yesterday too, but am too tired to link individual ones from the journal, so please go and look at the album at your own leisure. Because it was so sunny, all the lower lifts had long lines. There is no day at any ski resort where there is good snow, sun, and no lift queues.

We went up to Schindlergrat lift to start with, hoping that harder chair would keep out some of the riffraff. It's a 3-seater and popular today so it still had long lines. We did find some sweet powder off the top of there, that we'd never seen before because of all the clouds earlier in the week. That's route 15 on the map. We enjoyed it so much that we went right back up to do it a second time, looking for alternate regions that hadn't all been chopped up by skis yet. Those became harder to find as the day went on, of course. The second time we split up: the guys Sven and Björn (actually named Frederik and Tom respectively... and disappointingly, so I'll keep calling them by the better Swedish names) skirted some cliffs that I thought were too rocky to try to navigate, while Carolina and I traversed to the opposite side of the bowl to try that side's powder. My binoculars are good! I recognized them taking pictures of each other going down from across the bowl. Knew I carried those things around for a reason. The powder was really great. Sven showed up with snow almost up to his chest, and I splashed it usually above my knees and once up to my waist.

I wanted to take the Valluga gondola up to the highest peak and get some photographs, as this was likely to be the only day that I'd have a long, clear view. For some reason they preferred to go to Stuben first, and I didn't want to impose so I followed along - we cut across off-piste wherever possible, so it was a fun journey to there. From Stuben we skied in the woods and had a great adventure. It started around 1300. Once again we split up from Carolina, who is the slightly slower skier - she took the piste S2 down and agreed to meet us for lunch at the bottom. That piste winds around a lot and there are regions of trees you can ski in between the windings and get back to the piste below where you left, like short-cuts. On a sunny day it's supposedly safer to ski off-piste because you can at least see where you want to be headed. That only works if your destination piste is in your line of vision. We went too far to the left, and speculated that turning right and getting back to the piste that we could see would be a hassle. Sven suggested that if we go left more we could loop around the ridge ahead and rejoin the piste when it returned that way.

Our collective sense of adventure tried to kill us. We got lost. We went far too far to the left, following the tracks of some doomed soul who had the same bright idea before us. Ended up in a precarious situation with very little room to maneuver, clinging to the side of a valley with a stream running through it and trees or shrubs everywhere, and rocks lying hidden. We worked our way to the bottom and had to cross the stream to keep following the track. We took off our skis for that, but the stones in the stream shifted under my feet when I stepped into it. Good thing ski boots are so heavily armored. We then had to cross the stream a second time to get back to the side of the valley we belonged on, making me wonder why we'd crossed it in the first place. It was vigorous exercise; we worked up an appetite and I was sweating heavily by the time we got down. It took us some 40 minutes to make it down from there and we ended up having passed Stuben and kept Carolina waiting for a long time.

We had lunch at a little restaurant behind Stuben's church, that specializes in knödel. Those are potato-bread dumplings. I had the goulash soup still, and a weiss bier. Björn spent a lot of lunchtime on the phone, working. He sells TVs... He's a key account manager for LG. Sven ordered in German and got nothing like what he ordered. He got a kinder wiener with chips, and a different beer from the one he wanted. I thought it was non-alcoholic beer because that kind was on the menu by the same company. They must have thought he was a small child. His kinder meal "for princes and princesses" was supposed to come with a "sweet surprise" but he didn't demand his sweet surprise even after I reminded him that he should get one.

Lunch took a while, as it was a waited restaurant and service was slow. I left my payment and tip and left there at 1430 as the Swedes were finishing their apfelstrudels. I went up to the S3 bowl in Stuben, figuring that I had "plenty of time" to hit that on my way back to Valluga. It was choppy by then, many people having cut up the powder. The first run after lunch, my fingers froze because of the sweat soaking my gloves but at the bottom I took them off and thawed them out and it was all right. I left my gloves on the boot-warmer overnight and hope that doesn't ruin their insulation. There's a T-bar you have to take to get up to the Valfagehr lift from the bottom - it was packed with people waiting to get on. They also have a "magic carpet" people mover next to it, which was turned on today to help deal with the crowds. I got tired of waiting in line and took that, but it got stuck several times on the way up and most of the people got off and trudged up the side of it, whereupon it would start moving again. I stayed put.

In order to get to the region of Galzig from which I could take the gondola up to Valluga View, I had to ski around and take the crowded and busy Zammermoos chair. The high-traffic zone before that is always a pain and I know no other way to get there. I ended up arriving at Valluga at 1601, minutes after the last gondola had left. "Balls." I have failed you, my loyal readers, and have no panoramic pictures from the peak to show you. I must live with the shame of my many errors and ignoble failure.

From there I decided I may as well get back to St. Anton directly, so I began to take 2 down and saw that 2a, the marked un-groomed route, was open and visible. I took that a bit but so many people had followed the signs that it was as good as groomed, so I played around in the powder a bit and found short cuts fewer people had been to. I ended up following tracks someone left off the route and having another brief adventure. The moral of the story is, don't follow strangers' tracks! More likely than not, they don't know what the heck they're doing and will only get you in trouble. I did get to see a ski patrol helicopter circling overhead, and wonder if they thought I needed rescuing. I gave them the two thumbs up universal "I'm fine" signal. After some sideslips and slides I came out just below Zammermoos lift and had to ski down run 1 all the way to the bottom. I arrived a few minutes before 1630 but Gampen chairlift was already closed so I had to take the bus back from there to the hotel.

I checked the restaurant of the hotel next door, but I didn't like it: it was too dark, and I wasn't given a menu promptly - I'm not even sure they have them. So I left and went to the restaurant I liked. Wednesday is fondue night at "my" restaurant, which I read but forgot about. It was nice: all-you-can-eat fondue and starters of salmon and cold cuts. I filled up on those even before they brought me the fondue pot, and then I had a big bowl of deep-fried beef, pork, and chicken. I got a second fondue fork to make the slow cooking process more efficient, and wrote notes for my journal while I waited.