Danny feels the pull of the Eternal Snows again (Part III).
MPN11 ,
Your wish is my command, Sir !....D.
Monday at 1000, Ski School started. We kitted-up and assembled on the nursery slopes right outside the hotel. Under the scrutiny of the eagle-eyed Chief Instructor and his giant Alsatian, the beginners were hived-off in a bunch and led away; the rest of us were put on a slope and invited to show what we could do. This quick and efficient form of self-selection soon divided people into the appropriate classes. I suppose this method is used everywhere.
Mrs D, Mary and toboggan found a nice little spot close to the lower slope. There, they could play with the toboggan in the snow, and watch Daddy doing his stuff. Near by, there was a ski lodge where we had hot chocolate to keep us warm. In the first few days there would be the amusing spectacle of the beginners' class learning the kick-turn, and coming to grips with the "T"- bar for the first time. And there was a small hump of a hill fairly close to the nursery slopes, and on it they'd set up a slalom course for the intermediates (at the end of their second week). We weren't very good at it - the slalom poles were flying about like matchsticks.
Ski instruction must be much the same the world over; my previous times on the snow were helpful - but it had been eight years before. As I said, the "Kandahar" cable binding was still in use; the only difference was that the ski now had metal edges. And they were still the long, narrow planks which had been in use since time began. The accepted way then of measuring you for your ski was for you to reach as high as you could with shoulders level - then the ski should just touch your palm with level hand. Trying it now, I reach the height of an internal house door (say 78in, or 2m).
The longer your ski, the harder it is to learn how to control it. Generations of beginners have suffered needlessly, until around '65 the French came up with the idea of the ski evolutiv. Here you start with two broad ski about a metre long, so in no time at all you're parallel-skiing with the best of them. Then they swap them for 1.5 m, you get confident with that, and then up to whatever you feel comfortable with. And then the snowboard came in, effectively this is a double width 1m ski evolutiv: it was not greeted with open arms (at least by skiers) at first, but they seem to have got used to it.
Why were our ski so long before? I can only hazard a completely uninformed guess: in glacier skiing, you may run over a 50ft deep crevasse invisible under its snow "bridge". * The longer your ski, the safer ! It had become a traditional thing. And when would a Ski School have you on snow that might have "no visible means of support" ?
This was to be the last time I was on snow on skis, although a decade or so later, Mary and I tried a small artificial ** slope that the Army had built at Catterick. Effectively, you were on a sort of giant carpet of nylon bristles, which were very uncomfortable to fall on and nothing at all like snow. And there was no lift, so you had to herring-bone or sidestep up each time, and that was exhausting. It wasn't worth the trouble.
One day we put "skins" on the ski, took the cables out of the side clips, unfastened the heel safety-strap and followed our instructor into the wooded trails for a bit of "lang-lauf" The downhill parts were fine, the skins acting as a partial brake (and in any case the dips were gentle, as most mountain tracks obviouly traverse the slope). But going up was hard work indeed: soon we were puffing and blowing in shirt-sleeve order. No doubt it did us no end of good, but generally I preferred to get to the top of a run by lift - and after that let gravity do the work !
Our instructor had a small white dog of indeterminate parentage, which he carried up the mountain across his shoulders. Hearing his master calling him "Weissman" ("Whitey") - as I thought - I showed off my German with a feeble joke: "Noch nicht Omo-weiss !" ("Not quite Omo-white", as the animal was scruffy - and, shall we say, stood out against the snow). But this didn't go down at all well, for it seemed that the name was actually "Weitman" - ("Ranger"). I resolved to keep my jokes to myself in future.
(I hope this qualifies as Getting Back Somewhere Near the Thread, as I appear to be the last specimen in Prune captivity of a "Gainer").
Enough is as good as a Feast, more next time.
G'night folks, Danny42C.
What goes Up, Must come Down (one way or another !).
EDIT: Note * Ice corpses (sometimes hundred of years old, but perfectly preserved) turn up regularly at glacier "tails", having met their end in this way.
Note ** Curiously, there is artificial ice (for skating), too. I tried it once - about 40 years ago - it was terrible, I never thought to hear of it again - until now. Casually checking with Google, it seems that the stuff (or something like it) is alive and well in the US.
I quote from their "puff": "As EZ Glide 350 becomes scratched from normal skating use, skating speed increases. The surface performs better the more you use it!" (this is not only contra-intuitive - it's an affront to right reason !) And it works out at about $10/sq.ft., so a rink is not cheap, but then neither is an ice one.
D.
Last edited by Danny42C; 7th Feb 2014 at 19:45.
Reason: Add Notes.