This morning, Mrs IS was out of the door and off to the cable car whilst I was still searching for my ski socks. I caught up eventually on Mannlichen. Early on, the foehn wind was blowing again, but the forecast was for the wind to drop and be replaced by some new snow. The wind did die away late morning and heavy snow was falling within a few minutes.
The Idle Skier has been skiing on the same set of Stockli skis for some years now, with the occasional switch to a pair of powder skis. At a conservative estimate, they have done about 400 days on snow. Today, the bindings decided enough was enough. When the Tschuggen lift slowed to a stop in the early afternoon, and the T bar sank backwards as it always does, the change in angle caused the front part of the binding on my left ski to give way and my boot popped out on to the snow.
I was skiing with Pierre Lanz from the Privat ski school, which was very fortunate. After a couple of attempts to reattach the ski, we had to abandon the lift before it restarted.
We were some distance from anywhere really. Skiing on one ski was not a realistic possibility for the Idle Skier. So with a bit of work on the bindings, we swapped skis. Pierre skied to the bottom of the Tschuggen T bar on my one working ski and I skied on his Salomons.
At the T bar we managed some running repairs (thankfully it wasn’t too cold as we had been without gloves for half an hour or more) and after making it to the top of the T bar in one piece (minus various bits of my binding) we skied round to the Mannlichen chair.
At the top, there was plenty of fresh snow. It seemed a waste of a good skiing day to call a halt then, so we skied on, Pierre diverting to the village first for another pair of skis.
It may be holiday time, but this afternoon, with powder snow everywhere, the mountain was empty for the most part.
A day of unexpected ski maintenance and forecast fresh snow brought 6,494 vertical metres in 15 lift rides and 41 kilometres travelled.
Tomorrow, I will be skiing on new skis.
Idle thoughts from a mountain 