As usual when we don’t have anything better planned and the weather’s looking OK, our thoughts turn to the local mountains. Not too much driving. Cheap, like the birdies say. You should arrive at the parking lot before 9 am, otherwise your driving and parking competes with all those lift-riding people. When we got there the lifts weren’t even running, but by the time we were back at the car, around 1:30, there seemed to be lots of skiers and lots of hikers, but still room in the parking lot and no lineup to get into the parking lot.
We were probably the only people on the mountain doing just boots, except Freek was in running shoes. “Worked in Nepal” he said. Everybody else up there wore snowshoes, micro-spikes, full-on crampons, a few had skis, and I even saw a split-board go by. I saw zero avalanche transceivers, but maybe they kept them hidden. Some people had dogs. The dogs seemed happy. One young lady had purple pants and when I told her how much I liked purple pants she complemented me on my orange hat and then got her husband to take several pictures of us together. Carla wore her cotton pajamas, as usual. Oh, and there were two hang gliders riding the up-drafts coming from the east. Nice.
We skipped elevenses as we were pretty near the top of the first peak, but it was too drafty up there for snacking, so Carla and I stopped for a full-on lunch just below the first peak while Freek and Magda went on to peak #2. The sun shone on us for our lunch, but what do you expect, it’s the first day of spring, after all. On the way down we found one hill that we thought we might get to avalanche if we worked on it a bit, and I got about 100 kg of snow moving, but it wasn’t very enthusiastic. After that, most of us bum-schussed down anything that looked steep enough.
We did get home in time for an afternoon nap. Freek says he might buy boots. Magda was pretty competent; she even had gaiters.