And I spent the rest of the afternoon skiing my brains out. Boy, I'll be sore tomorrow (heck, I'm sore now), but man, was the skiing great. Crowded though — the owner of the ski rental office said that this week has been tremendous, and he didn't like it one bit: he was running out of rental equipment (he prefers the customers to have some choice available, rather than having to settle for what's left), and he pointed out with wounded pride that the famous local ski school didn't have enough instructors to keep "class" sizes as small as they always do.

So many parts of the slopes — especially the beginner/easy intermediate stuff — were overcrowded. And snowboarders and carvers were thrashing all over the most immediate and accessible steeper slopes. Much as I try not to be prejudiced: Boarders really do treat the slopes like they own them, with no regard for anyone else who might want to ski there, plus they always butt ahead in lift lines and even when the lines are backed up insist on taking an entire chair — which normally seats two or three skiers — all to themselves.

But this minor annoyance aside, the day was fabulous. Sometimes I'd go down a more out-of-the-way advanced run and suddenly be all by myself, with nothing but the sounds of my skis crackling across the powder and the heavy loads of snow on the trees slowly sifting and whispering down between the spruce needles (their straining boughs are weighed down with loads of up to two to three feet of dry and remarkably cohesive snow).

Even the heavily traveled runs had plenty of fresh snow to go around, and away from the major runs there was a downy layer of two or three feet of fresh powder atop six more feet of new snow — sometimes I'd go for half an hour without ever seeing my skis (or my boots) as they glided along beneath the powder.

And that was the other thing: I could easily go for over half an hour without ever having to stop and get in a lift line. The slopes just went down forever. I could just start slaloming down, pressing into one gliding turn after the next, hauling the skis through the powder into graceful arcs first to the left then to the right, pushing on until my legs burned, then pushing harder until they were on fire, and the slope kept going and going until I didn't know if my lungs or my thighs would burst first, with my feet throbbing and my knees screaming until suddenly I was turning through the snow with no pain at all and everything around me melted away except the rhythm of the skis, the sharp wind against my cheeks and forehead, and the blinding whiteness of the snow all around me.

And when I did finally stop and look up! The setting kept hitting me like a giddy revelation, so gorgeous I actually didn't know whether to laugh or cry or stand around gaping like a fool (I usually chose the latter). These pristine white hills are suspended high above the massive, glacier-carved U of the Lauterbrunnen valley (the largest and deepest of its kind in the world).

I was surrounded by an impossibly grand amphitheater of mighty mountains, each over 10,000 feet high yet seeming to hover just beyond my fingertips, with clear alpine sunlight playing off the granite and snow of their peaks, glaciers pouring off their sides in frozen rivers of crystal, and in between me and the mountains and me and the valley lie carpets of blue-green arrowheads limned with white that looked like scrub brush but I knew were actually forests of 60- and 80-foot high Alpine Fir and Norwegian Spruce.

more >>