Skiing: the pain and the pleasure
I’m sweating as I suck air into my lungs. At this altitude you feel drained after just five minutes of strenuous exertion. My legs sink as I strive to keep up, my skis dig into my shoulder and I lose my balance. I fall. Again. Ben calls back to see if I’m ok. I struggle to pull myself up out of the thigh deep powder.
Who thought up skiing? It’s a crazy concept; pay lots of money to get cold and throw yourselves down steep icy hills on nothing but two skis that resemble plastic curtain rails. Why am I doing this? I question my own sanity as I feel the sun beat down on my back and the glare off the snow. Why am I walking when I have paid to use the ski lifts? Finally I catch up and reach the ridge. We stand taken aback by the stunning view. We look across and see sweeping French valleys with a thick coating of beautiful snow.
As we peer off the ridge we can only see about four sets of tracks. Traversing across we move along until all that is below is pure undisturbed powder. Then the descent starts. All is quiet except the gentle swish swish swish as our skis carve tracks into the mountain.
Then I realise this is it. This is the reason we trekked up there. This overwhelming sense of freedom and excitement makes it all worth it. As we take a different chair lift and look around, a weird sense of achievement spreads through us as we see that we have left our own individual tracks on the landscape.