Saturday, March 24, 2012

Alpine Skiing

While I wasn't looking forward to a cold Spring Break, I was looking forward to skiing and it has been great.  I took today off (vacation from vacation) but skied the past 5 days.  We skied over to Switzerland twice (the hotel is in Italy).  Skiing here is much different than in the Canadian Rockies - much higher, wide open spaces, not much difficulty - but I think I like both for their different pluses.

I took my camera when we skied into Zermatt, Switzerland yesterday and got lots of good photos.

 Two places at once-
one foot in Italy, one foot in Switzerland


The very impressive-looking Matterhorn




Excellent skiers!


Despite how the above photo looks, Olivia retired her famous "snow-plow slide" skiing style and was very impressive on the slopes all week!

At the Iglu - a bar and HOTEL made of snow
Frank's favorite stop as evidenced by the photo


We had great weather the whole week.  It snowed on Sunday as we arrived, over night, and most of Monday which left a great layer of powder which just about lasted in the the mostly plus-freezing temps we had the rest of the week.  Apparently the snow was pretty bad before we arrived so we were lucky to get a good snow storm to start the week.

The resorts here all run together in one large ski area and there are mostly gondolas to ride between different runs.  One takes you all the way to the top of the glacier where you can ski year round.  It was a pretty scary ride.  Here are the views from the top:


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