Spin out

Earlier breakfast today as it snowed all night, squalled past the breakfast room window fresh from the mountain tops as we ate and kept it up all day in buckets.

Minus fourteen with minus twenty five wind chill and about 300mm of fresh snow with drifts up to about a meter. Di was less keen to pump the powder so we agreed to meet for lunch at Buna.

It was quite heavy snow requiring significant lean-back and thigh burn. First run I hit a drift too far forward over the skis and somersaulted. Took me fifteen minutes to find my skis (no straps). Not that that was unusual, there bodies climbing out of deep holes all over the place. Twas heavy work though, and required a few piste runs to get my breath back.

After a couple of hours of powder through the trees I was knackered, the cloud came in and the wind increased, time to go. Goggles were iced up and fogged out in a heavy white-out and I got motion sickness and then full-on vertigo. I couldn’t turn my head or body without plummeting into a sickening head spin that totally through my balance. Bizarrely, my vision closed right in too. Just lucky that I was back on piste and not out in the trees. Even so, it still took quite some time to slowly follow the pole line back to the cafe at the top of the bubble chair. By then, going slow, I was proper cold.

Texted Di to say I couldn’t make Buna, I was screwed, and could she come and get me….sat inside shivering and nauseous. Di, who had found a really nice table in the warmth at Buna, had to gear up again for the cold, ski down paradise and then get the paradise and bubble chairs up to where I’d got to but got there in record time nonetheless. By then I could stand enough, without spinning or hurling, to get to the heater and Di got soup and hot chocolate – true legend. Di also spoke to the ski patrol and patrol nurse who checked me out and arranged for them to Skidoo me back down to the top of the gondola.

Sounds woosy I know but I still hadn’t shaken the head spins and nausea and wasn’t skiing anywhere. Di was amazing. Don’t know what I would’ve done solo.

Back in the village the spinning-nausea eased back and we both dozed off the morning’s excitement.

We discussed the day’s events over a beer and warm saki at “horse meat” restaurant later that night then, as the snow had finally abated, took a gentle walk about town; up past Toemu, up to the Gondola and back down the winding streets flowing with steaming hot spring water keeping the snow at bay.

Such a metamorphosis from when we arrived, towering snow drifts covering the once bare walls and trees, massive icicles where rain poured off yesterday’s bare roof tops and the babbling brooks and streams frozen silent or muffled under the heavy drifts.

A book and a glass of wine by the fire and off to bed.