4 – 11 February, 2006: Fieberbrunn, Austria

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And the snow keeps falling

One foot in front of the other. Easier said than done. With every step, with every attempt to advance I sink deeply into the waist-high powder snow. I take another step forward, first pulling my foot out of its current hole, which is not easy to do when standing in waist-high snow and then moving my foot forward hoping that it will find stronger support than the previous step. I am breathing heavily and am starting to sweat despite the freezing temperatures and the slow pace.
Taking a short rest, I look around and admire the gentle descent of millions of snow flakes. The trees around me are completely covered with snow, branches bending down from the heavy load until occasionally they bend so far that the entire accumulation of snow slides down. Behind me there are only about 10 meters of footprints, not much for 10 minutes of hard walking. Having decided to snowboard down the “scenic” route through the forest rather than taking the marked ski-slope, I quickly realized that my forest route ended in a dead-end next to a small creek and the only way to return to the ski-slope was to unbuckle my snowboard and carry it up a 20 meter hill.
I resume my involuntary walk and my progress is no faster than before. I take step after step while the snow simply keeps on falling effortlessly in comparison with my struggle to walk through it. This marks day 5 of the snowboard trip and it seems that it has been snowing non-stop since the first day. In fact, it has snowed so much that I am not sure I have ever seen so much snow. Everything is covered by a thick blanket of white. On the sides of the streets walls of snow now are piled up, roofs are overflowing and I am loving every moment of it. I love the way it looks, it feels and most of all I love the unique feeling of snowboarding in deep untouched powder snow.
Finally I reach the ski slope and once again my feet regain a solid foot-hold. 20 meters travelled; not much for 20 minutes of work. I buckle back into my snowboard and begin my descend of the mountain. And the snow keeps on falling.



The Dance

Below a sea of white unfolds and stretches several hundred meters until the ski slope takes a turn to the right. The ongoing snowfall and slight fog leave limited visibility making it difficult to see its contextures, hills, dips, patches of ice and making the horizon merge into the mountain without any distinction. Few people are in sight and evidently prefer to warm their cold faces with a cup of hot chocolate or Knödel soup leaving the vast mountain deserted and yielding all the space in the world to the few remaining skiers. I shift my weight and lean forward, bending over as if diving toward the valley, pushing my face toward the snow. My body’s decline steepens and for a moment I feel as if the gravitational pull would cause me to fall into the while blanket below, but I have come to trust the strong support of my snowboard, whose edge presses strongly into the snow cutting along a long round curve. I feel the strong centrifugal force in my knees and know that the board will hold and guild me smoothly around the curve. My face continues to approach the snow, the surface below flying by, my body seeming magically suspended in the air giving me a rush of excitement. Cold wind and snow hit my face but the excitement induced heat radiating from me is too strong to even notice the chill. My snowboard has now cut around the curve and its momentum pushes my body back into a straight position. Again, I lean forward this time pushing my back into the mountain initiating the next curve. The dance continues.