Ski
Trip 2002
School ski-trip Diary
18th
March
Woken
up by Gordon at a very early and undisclosed time, and banged
my head badly off the top bunk as he asked me vaguely where his
dog was. I tried to hit him but ended up banging my head again.
Typical. Shouted a bit and told them what I thought of people
waking others up hours before they had to be ready, and they left.
Checked out how my ski gear was after being hung over the balcony
all night, and found that it had aired out quite nicely, and it
was at least dry having dripped with sweat the day before. Did
the usual getting ready process, apart from throwing Gordon a
dirty look, and avoiding eating meat so early in the morning,
and caught bus to Ehrwald at 9:15 along with others. Mr. Sutton
and the advanced group were going up to the Zugspitz today. Formed
up with Carsten's group at 10:00. That morning Carsten led us
down to the end of the flat base area and told us that today we
would be going down the blue slope. I looked down the slope. Uh
Oh. Fear gripped me for the first time. He took off and the others
followed, pulling the widest snow ploughs that they could, and
praying to God that they would be all right. Every two minutes
we would stop and wait for the half dozen of us that had fallen
over. It took us two and a half hours to go down to the chair
lifts, up onto the blue slope above the base area and down to
the Gasthof. And I sweated and prayed every minute of the way.
The sheer slopes that stretched onwards terrified me, and I wondered
on countless occasions, how will I ever get down?
When we finally had lunch in the Gastof after the most enduring
ordeal I had ever been through, I told Carsten that I would stay
in his group. The reason for this was that my fears of heights
and speed needed to be controlled and there was more of a chance
of me not getting killed if I took the slopes at a nice slow pace,
I got home without any injuries, any bad falls and any careering
into trees or off cliffs.
I spent the rest of the day going over the route again with Carsten,
and staying to practise on the slope above the base area, which
you could access easily using a T-Bar, therefore I came to call
my favourite blue slope the T-Bar slope. When I say you could
access it easily, what I mean is that you could get there quickly
from the base area without skiing to the chair lifts further down
the mountain, by using: the T-Bar. This was a contraption of hell
in my view, being basically a big inverted "T" towed
by a wire overhead, that you used to lift you by getting your
ass in front of it and holding onto it for dear life as it hauls
you up terribly straight and steep slopes. Let go and you ski
backwards down the slope very fast. While Ciana tried this, I
didn't. However the problem came when you had to chuck it off
at the end. This concept gave me a little difficulty at the start.
After letting go too early and going into a snow drift, I tried
to let go later, failed to let go at all, got caught on said T-Bar,
and was nearly dragged to my death into this big, wooden thing.
I managed to unhook myself in time and lay in the snow thanking
the dear god that I had survived, when the T-Bar stopped. The
man in the cabin for operating the T-Bar put down his newspaper,
got calmly out of his hut and said to me in German, "you're
supposed to get off back there."
It was for this reason that later in the Quiz that evening I became
known as "The Terror of the T-Bar" We had had the quiz
instead of going to see a ski show which had been cancelled due
to the worsening weather. I was proud to be part of the team,
"Slippery Nipples" which came third, mainly because
we kept putting "John McCrohan" down for most of our
answers. Still, it was good fun. The team that won, "shoes",
were crap name pickers anyway. The rest of the night was spent
hanging around and chatting and messing, with the occasional game
of spin the bottle. Mr Sutton and the advanced group had gone
up to the Zugspitz and said that it was brilliant. He had also
said that the rest of us might go up tomorrow.
